
Originally Posted by
Insidious
Think Lavia does or doesn't get done irrespective of the Phillips transfer.
Am I right in saying we made an initial bid of £36m for Lavia? Fans have been of the "it's only a few million" mindset to meet their £50m evaluation - and on paper I get it - £14m isn't a massive amount of money in the grand scheme of football transfers.
However, we are known for having our own evaluations of what someone costs and being keen not to overpay. If we did go and get him at £50m for example (versus the initial £36m) then the increase is £14m. It's worth pointing out here that £14m represents a 38.889% chunk of £36m ie an overpayment of our perceived evaluation of nearly 40%.
I imagine - and this is purely speculation so take it for what it is - that as part of our process we will have our evaluations of players based on statistical analysis, then a ball-park percentage we are willing to overpay for the right targets as a general rule and then anything that is over that we either walk away from OR decide the extent to which we'll overshoot via debate within a committee.
As a lesser example, I would 100% understand the frustration of us going for a target at £8m, a club asking for £12m and fans being livid because "it's only £4m" - which is a tiny amount of money in the current market. However, it would also represent a whopping 50% overpay of your valuation and if you overpay regularly, you'll get taken to the cleaners when it comes to the bigger names - so I could also understand walking from such a deal despite how little £4m is in a footballing context. A £75m Van Dijk style bid suddenly becomes a request to cough up £112.5m and so on - and thus your capacity to afford multiple targets is lessened.
For the record I do believe that sometimes you do have to overpay and occasionally should, but I would be keen to strike the right balance. The same with sales - we could have had a combined £25m for Ox and Phillips (£12.5m bids came in) and we held out for £30m (we wanted £15m each) and in a context where we wanted/needed an extra mid (rather than Arthur) I'd have taken that money and reinvested it into recruitment immediately even though it would go against the principle of doing business at the "right" amount - having self-imposed rules to keep business sensible is great but occasionally rules need to be bent too.
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