When news broke today that Alfredo Morelos had agreed terms with Lille it was pretty clear that this was not just speculation.
As a few of the Sevco sites pointed out, one of his favourite journalists back in Colombia had retweeted all the stories, so something was afoot. Something was happening, and it was not just Chinese Whispers.
The stories from France all said that the clubs were locked in talks over the fee. Some of the UK press had been briefed that Sevco was “holding out” for the fee they thought they were due. The rumours were being put about that they’d got their £20 million.
All of a sudden, the story has died. Sevco has denied that the clubs are in talks. What are we to make of this exactly? Do we accept the Ibrox statement at face value? Yes, I think we do. Talks are probably not taking place. But they were, and that seems beyond doubt.
So what happened here?
Well that seems obvious; I reckon that Sevco over-reached, and probably in a big way.
Once the story had broken, they hoped they could spark more interest and in the meantime they pushed Lille with their demands for a whopping fee the French club had no intention whatsoever of paying. There seems to have been an assumption that because they had an offer of £25 million turned down for their last target that they’d offer Sevco the same, or something close to it, for the moody striker who’s scored once this year.
But when a club starts to move down the ladder of its potential targets it doesn’t offer more for each one on the list; the fees start to go down, and Morelos was probably not even the second target but even farther down the line.
A fee reaching into eight figures was about what Ibrox could expect … but we know that they are delusional over there.
Lille refused to go higher, and now Sevco is briefing the media that the offer fell short. Far short. Which is why the French club has done walking away.
So tonight, with that deal almost certainly dead, what is Sevco left with?
A player who knows the club priced him out of the move he’d already agreed, Gerrard still rattling the tin cup for the money he knows is the only chance he has of saving his career and Sevco supporters who were shell-shocked first and then convinced themselves that the sale was a good thing and the manager would get a mountain of money now trying to convince themselves that this is a good thing instead. A perfect recipe for trouble.
Like I said, watch how this one develops. It doesn’t have a happy ending for Ibrox.
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