Daizen Maeda

Why?
I know there's a theoretical upper limit for any player sold out of Scotland but if we recruit well, we'll still make decent profit on the majority and as we do better in Europe the ceiling will raise also.

But much more importantly - we'd have a much better team on the pitch....
and isn't that the whole point?

 

If we spend 80% of our biggest transfer fees on the replacement, we'll make a massive loss on player registration trading. For a club like us that doesn't get a huge amount from TV or worldwide merchandising, that would probably be enough to push us into a loss overall.

 

I don't get it - spending less than we get in surely can't be risking FFP or other rules?
Celtic must be 10 million miles away from FFP issues?

Happy to be educated otherwise!

 

Look, I'm no expert and I don't want to invest the time it would take me to look into it in detail. I'm just going on what to me looks like common sense. Feel free to correct me on any of this, but FWIW, the following seems right to me:

Firstly, there have to be costs associated with any transfer: agents' fees, medical fees, administration fees, that kind of thing. Bureaucracies are amazingly good at extracting both legitimate service fees and rents at every stage .

Secondly, the profits from successful trades have to cover the costs of the signings where we make a loss.

Thirdly, there are overheads to cover, the cost of the scouting network, the data analytics, flights, etc. Note that our succesful transfers where we make a profit have to cover the overheads and the fees of the unsuccessful ones and not only their own. Just think of all those project signings!

Then there will be sell on clauses to deal with. Of course, we have them too (e.g. Frimpong); but it's the nature of these things that at the moment when we sell, the sell-on clauses of previous clubs are activated and they get their cut, whereas any sell-on clauses we add are still potential and dependent on the player doing well enough to earn a bigger move, avoiding major injury, etc.

Finally, it's worse than that, as football "inflation" has masked some of our failures; but we can't rely on that always continuing. So we need to take into account that our success rate is not as good as it might look if we just naively look at fees and adjust for CPI inflation.

 

I never said that we should recycle 80% of all transfers, I just said that no player in our squad is unsellable/irreplaceable, and that every single one of them could be replaced by similar/better quality if we recycled the transfer fees more progressively as we needed. The drop of selling players for £20-25M and replacing them with £4-8M replacements is a business decision, and could be mediated by the occasional footballing ones...

And I'm very clear repeatedly that I am not against the way the club is run on a balanced, growing situation financially, but rather it's the cash hoarding that bothers me. There's absolutely no need for a club in Scotland, with a virtually simple path to cl football every year to have £80M in the bank while risking that cl qualification by not investing some of it in advance.

 

I never said you did say that we should recycle 80% of all transfers or that you were against "the way the club is run on a balanced, growing situation financially".

I was not making a point about our transfer policy in general nor was I proposing a percentage limit on recycling fees: obviously, there are times when we should spend far more than 80% of a transfer fee on the replacement. For example, Nawrocki cost us about the same as we got for Starfelt and, although it didn't work out, recycling 100% of the fee was both justified and affordable. It can and should even go higher than 100% at times. For example, if we sell a winger who failed here for £2 million, it might easily be sensible to spend 300% (£6 million) on a replacement.

The point I made was that the reason guys like CCV and Maeda are irreplaceable is that it is precisely these big transfer fees where we can't afford to recycle 80% of the fee into the replacement for all the reasons I gave above (and others I didn't think of until now).

 

Theoretically we could sell Maeda for 25M and buy a replacement for 20M. I think 9 times out of 10 it would be a bad move.

The risk of overspend is huge and far from guaranteed we get a player of the same quality. Even if everything pointed to the replacement being quality, there is always risk of a transfer not working out for various reasons. Or a bad injury occurring etc

It would also start to bomb out the wage structure on the club. A player moving here for 20M is likely going to want serious wages. Other players at the club then want comparatively higher wages when negotiating a new deal and so forth. We would have next to resale value on him. If we sign him on a 3 or 4 year deal he can leave for nothing at the end of his contract.

Even with the reserves we have built up I think that approach carries too much risk.

 

What we should be doing is let’s use Kuhns sale as an example as that’s been completed.

£c17m received. We should actually spend all of that 17m not on 1 direct replacement but 2/3 replacements directly into first team players. That’s roughly 5/6m per player if we say 3. That’s how you lose a top first team player and actually come out better by strengthening the rest of the team.

I am not seeing evidence of this yet. We are getting project players with potential to be squad players. We need direct first 11 players - 2 wingers and 1 CB all can be bought with Kuhn money.

Im not really bothered if we don’t touch any of the 70/80m in the bank. I’m happy if the board say we aren’t touching this it’s a rainy day fund to make up opex losses if we have a bad year it can probably cover a good 5 bad years if we don’t make CL or do really poorly in EL.

What i do then want is a zero net spend ie all profit from sales go directly into replacements/squad. We have said in the past that we reinvest all money received, well that’s blatantly not true. We regularly come out with negative net spend year on year.

The only way we can improve our team on the pitch is to reinvest player sales adequately. Lose a top player get in 2 good players that cumulatively strengthen the team. That requires excellent scouting and structure and forward planning.

 

Ok, I'm not 100% sure we're not actually agreeing with each other on at least some of these matters... (Edit: from this and previous posts)

1) we both agree to spending more on the right players.
2) neither want us to throw money for the sake of it
3) both think balanced accounts are essential in our league
4) both think a generic % idea is as stupid as a maximum cap on transfer/wages
5) neither stupid enough to assume only the cash transfer component is a factor in these deals

I just don't understand why that makes any of the players irreplaceable? I mean, if we sold a player for £20M, paid 15% as sell-on (£3M), half again as hidden fees (£1.5M) and then banked say £2M for the company in general, we'd still have £13.5M to get in an established player - around our club record, which is why I had no problem with that fee.

And I think I'm probably being generous with those numbers. We sell some for more in recent times. We won't have more than 10% sell-on on most, with it also being reduced by the fee paid to start with, so most would be more like £1.5M for £20M or £2M for £25M, so another £1.5-5M banked...

Total, back of a * packet math, but none of it seems unreasonable. And I'm pretty sure it would allow us to pay Idah type transfers consistently. Picking up Kyogo/Maeda deals are brilliant, but it shouldn't be the absolute lynchpin of our dealings. We can do both...

 

Can't be selling both Kuhn AND Maeda ffs. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

 

The Kuhn at the beginning of the season or at the end?
Also Daezen in the second half, again, no way. But before that he used to receive pelters for his final ball etc.
Maybe selling players at the top of their game is what we should be doing, but only if we have confidence in strengthening the squad overall every time we do so.

Tottenham sold Bale for loads of dosh and brought in a fair few. But the quality wasnt there and the team overall suffered.

 

I dont think thats too far off the kind of model we are pursuing.

Id guess over the last 5 or 6 year we have probably re-invested 80% of our transfer fees receives into transfer fees spent (ballpark).

I know this year we have yet to spend the Kuhn money, but I do think the plan is to spend it.

 

Or... We could sell Maeda for £25M and get in 2 "replacements", at £10M and £8M, and so bank an extra £2M and replace with a less risky substitute whilst simultaneously reinforcing another position in the team with similar strength... We might even reinforce 2 entirely different positions and promote from within for his forward/winger role given our increased strength elsewhere...

People are being far too literal in the replacement aspects. Strength is strength, no matter where you put it. It's not like we don't have other forward players who can step up if we reinforce the midfield to supply/free them up, and if we stop shipping stupid goals at the back meaning we need 2 or even 3 goals a game to ensure the win

 

This is very close to my thoughts, except I still think the "rainy day" fund is too conservative. The board have a locked in syndrome about saving and showing off the accounts. In any other businesses this would see them overthrown and replaced. Assets idle are assets squandered in business.

But I could live with it, if we saw holistic, progressive development as a whole, which I do but just far more muted than we're capable of... A single/2 player(s) sold for the direct replacement by 3 £7-8M players would revolutionise our squad...

 

We did this last season selling MOR. 1 big sell to fund Idah, Engels and Trusty. Id guess we plan to do the same with the Kuhn money.

 

Yes, we agree on all that.

I don't want to repeat myself, so I'll just summarise here (you can find more carefully-argued details above). Basically, my argument was roughly that the transfer side of things must be quite expensive and that I think we rely on the occasional big profit to stay in the black on player trading, as they cover not only their own overheads and running costs, but also those of many of the smaller deals and, importantly(!), the losses of the bad deals.

A few extra things that I didn't think of saying before:

1) One reason why I think we are so reliant on these big paydays to fund other parts of our transfer system is precisely that the transfer fees we recieve dwarf the costs we have to pay. Imagine we buy a player for £2 million in 2025 and sell him 2 years later for £3 million. Let's say that £3 million in 2027 buys you the same in the player market as £2.5 million in 2025. That's just a £500k profit on traing for that player in 2025 pounds. If the cost of all the scouting, analytics, flights, medicals, agents fees, lawyers, UEFA fees, etc is, say, £250k (which is a total guess, but doesn't seem totally unreasonble), that's half the profit wiped out. These are really tight margins and we make an awful lot of these signings and some of them don't work out and we make a loss.

In contrast, if we sell someone for £20 million and make a profit on trading of, say, £12 million, you can fund an awful lot of transfer activity for that and £250k of fees hardly makes a dent. I don't think it is coincidence that we seem to make at least one of these big sales most summers but are much less keen to make more than one.

2) I don't think £13.5 million reliably replaces a Maeda or a CCV. It gets you an Arne Engels type with the potential to develop into that quality over 2 or 3 years. That's why the figure someone suggested before (and that I was responding to) was 80%. 80% of £25 million (a reaonable fee for Daizen or CCV IMHO) is £20 million.

3) The risk gets bigger the closer we get to paying what we take in on these big deals. If an £9 million deal for Idah makes a loss in the end (which is now looking possible), the big £20 million+ sales are exactly the thing that will cover it. A couple of bad investments at £20 million, on the other hand, could devastate us.

4) Even if we decided to take that risk (let's imagine DD promised to personally backstop the deals or something), we don't have a proven track record of investing big fees wisely. We buy young players with resale value. Show me a 22-year-old defender who is already an equal replacement at that age for a CCV currently in his prime and I'll show you the next Van Dijk. Addmittedly, such youngsters are out there; do you trust our recruitment structure to find them?

So all in all, I don't think that CCV and Daizen can be replaced. That doesn't mean we couldn't spend £11 million on someone who could develop into a replacement over 2-3 years. We could and hopefully would. But going into this season, CCV and Daizen are irreplaceable IMHO.

 

CCV is irreplaceable, Daizen is not.

If Maeda doesn't sign a new deal, I think we have to cash in on a player that has absolutely peaked in terms of performance, reputation and value.

Critical however is to then immediately buy in a couple of very well scouted strikers/wingers in the £10M price range.
If that doesn't happen, we should keep him.

 

And 10-11 goals and possibly assists on top from Kyogo. From last season I mean - just not the Summer.