Today another Alfredo Morelos story died on the vine. Today another one bit the dust as far-fetched tales about Leverkusen were kicked into touch.
Morelos has no offer from the Germans, and thus the Germans will not be making an offer to the club.
A sensational thread on Twitter right now from our friend @ClusterOne2 has laid out the media’s deplorable record of peddling Sevco propaganda on this. If he’s missed a single ridiculous headline I don’t know what it is.
The number of teams who have been tipped to “swoop” for Freddy The Ned is longer than the Chinese phone book.
The media pushes this stuff on Ibrox’s behalf.
The objective is to spread the word around Europe that this guy is a hot property.
The thing is, this hasn’t worked and it’s not going to work.
They have left one major consideration out of their thinking.
The people who would have to sanction a multi-million-pound decision to sign him don’t read The Daily Record. They don’t care about The Daily Record. They don’t care what Ibrox Noise thinks he’s worth or what Rangersmedia says he’s worth.
Clubs will send scouts first. But to what? SPL games? He’s barely scored this year. So even if they’d been impressed earlier in the campaign, the follow up reports wouldn’t be great, would they? The player looks lazy and disinterested.
They’d do background reports. How does he settle? What’s his off-field personality?
All the PR stories of helping the poor back home will get him only so far, but then the club investigators will run into tales of private eyes hired by his missus and all that goes with it.
Does he mix well with others in the dressing room? Nope, or they’d be supporting him against the manager.
How does he handle pressure? In a dozen games against us he’s never scored.
The red card count is significant, and a serious problem.
Now he’s fourth choice striker.
All the Daily Record hype in the world isn’t going to make serious people at a major club recommend to their board that they spend a major eight figure sum on this guy, and if you follow @ClusterOne2’s thread you’ll see that there was, at least, a semblance of sanity in the numbers being talked about … at the start.
At the time. Before the phantom Chinese bid.
And that was the moment everything went to Hell with whatever plan they had over there.
The Chinese story was a pure fabrication from start to finish, with a ludicrous sum of money as the central premise. Morelos had no way of knowing if the story was true, but his agent got the first of two major wage rises as a result of it … and the expected bidding war never happened.
Now, in spite of the manifest insanity of it, the club has started to believe its own publicity and values him at an exorbitant amount. Even if they did some serious backtracking and blamed the player himself for them not getting their “valuation”, they would still have to explain to their fans that it had all been for nothing.
And the craziest thing is, they appear to have spent money on the assumption that they will get a fee towards the upper end of the scale … and that’s just not going to happen and it never was, even under optimal conditions, which they don’t have.
Serious money men at big clubs, the kind who can spend the stupid money the Ibrox club is talking about, won’t be in the slightest bit impressed by fake news stories and hype.
They will have other metrics to consider, and Gary Ralston’s bizarre fantasies has nothing to do with them.
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