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Sevco’s Insulting Transfer Terms Are Putting UK Clubs Off Dealing With Them.

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Have you noticed that Sevco is finding it easier to sign players from abroad than it is to sign them here, in the UK?

Dorrans remains at Norwich. The Motherwell players they were interested in remain at Fir Park. Hearts may yet part company with their young winger Jamie Walker, but I would not put my life savings on him ending up at Ibrox.

And yet they’ve been able to get deals over the line elsewhere. Plenty of them too.

This is an interesting phenomenon, and not entirely unexpected.

Indeed, there are good reasons why they find it easier to deal with foreign clubs than with those who play their football here. One of them is this; foreign clubs are more ready and willing to accept deals which depend on enhancements. UK clubs, who know Sevco have previous for dodging out of those agreements, and who are worried that the club might not remain financially viable long enough to pay the full whack, aren’t as ready and willing to take them at their word.

Motherwell warned Sevco about trying to get their players on the cheap, especially on the kind of terms the club had in mind; a risible up-front fee followed by instalments, as if they were buying players on hire purchase. Hearts are just as wary; I’m told the £500,000 Sevco have “offered” for Jamie Walker is even more scandalous than it sounds, with less than a quarter of that up-front and the rest over a lengthy period by which Sevco hopes to have sold him on.

Neither of those clubs is willing to play ball.

They know when they are being insulted, and the very public pursuit of these players is clearly designed to unsettle them and force the club to do business on whichever terms Sevco finds palatable. The interest in Jamie Walker’s social media interactions – he follows Sevco on Twitter and Instagram – are suddenly in the public domain; Hearts are already being painted as a club doing a young man out of his dream.

This backfired, spectacularly, two years ago with Scott Allan.

Hearts, under their own iron lady, are not about to be pushed around either.

Likewise with Norwich, who believe Sevco’s offer for Dorrans – £250,000 of it upfront and a further undisclosed sum staggered over the length of his contract – is equally insulting. They aren’t willing to be taken for mugs either.

I have no idea how much actual transfer cash Sevco has spent – as with everything, you have to sift through the lies and the spin to get to the truth – but many European clubs and those from Central America don’t have the first clue what our neighbours’ reputation is like.

They are much easier to deal with than those which do.

If Sevco wants UK based players they’re going to have to pay real money for them.

In advance.

I can see why most of their attention was focussed elsewhere.

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