As regular readers are well aware, there have been a rash of stories in the Scottish press over the last couple of years about Alfredo “Mad Dog” Morelos and big money interest in him from places as far afield as China and Turkey.
There is not a word of truth in most of those stories.
The media has worked tirelessly to bum this guy up, except towards the tail end of last season when even the most devoted Ibrox watcher could see that he had become a huge liability to them in their failed quest to stop our march towards 3Treble.
But as this site has pointed out, repeatedly, in the last few months the Ibrox club is not in position where it can continue to spend money without some extra cash being brought in, and much of the media’s hype of Morelos has been about trying to attract the kind of bid that would give them some leeway in their spending.
They allegedly value him at £20 million.
This is not even remotely realistic.
The trouble with it – which you cannot explain to their fans no matter how hard you try – is that Morelos is a two-bob SPL level footballer, and one prone to rash behaviour at that. The most they were ever going to get for him, in spite of his goals, was around £5 million.
How interesting, then, that a former West Ham employee has confirmed that his club understands that Morelos would be available for precisely that sum.
This is news that will be resolutely denied inside Ibrox, but my understanding has always been that they would be willing to let Morelos go for around that figure provided neither club disclosed the fee. That would allow the media to make up any old pish that it wanted … or that the Ibrox club asked them to publish.
Morelos will leave Ibrox at some point in the not too distant future, and the club is going to have to explain to its fans why he was allowed go for what amounts to a nominal fee – at least in comparison to what they’ve told their supporters to expect.
This is a mess of their own making, and it’s going to haunt them well into the future.
They need to get Morelos and some others off the wage bill, but that won’t happen until they get real over the transfer fee.
This West Ham insider is the first to break ranks and suggest that some form of sanity is taking hold there.
Just don’t expect it to last. It never does.