If you believe what you read in the papers, all is well inside Ibrox and nobody is worried at all. Players are being brought in. Negotiations are underway. The media is presenting a picture of calm over there. It is, as usual, covering a multitude of issues.
Ibrox’s transfer policy has failed, and failed utterly. News today that they expect Ryan Kent to sign a new deal this week is being greeted amongst their supporters with joy. But we’ve all seen Kent, and we know exactly what he’s worth. If he stays, then it’s not a victory but an admission of defeat. They would have loved to have moved him on this year.
Because their entire financial model, as they have admitted over and over again, is to develop players and sell them at a massive profit. They have made a few quid out of the Aribo deal, but under pressure from a support which will not accept anything less, every penny of that is set to be sunk back into the team.
We sell players for such high fees that we can actually invest some of the money in other areas of the club, or stick some in the bank in case some disaster – like COVID – hits us like a sledgehammer. Their entire profit-loss model has been constructed around the idea that at some point they will be able to fund the club from sales instead of running up debts.
And because that’s the strategy, and because they haven’t got there, all inside Ibrox are shell-shocked that they didn’t even get the release clause cash up front for a guy they considered one of their star performers.
£6 million for a player they valued much, much higher is atrocious business, and if they are now throwing money at Morelos and Kent to get them to sign new deals they have essentially admitted defeat when it comes to moving them on for big fees.
Kent and Morelos are in their mid-twenties now. If they sign three year deals those guys are locked into Ibrox until their re-sale value has just about gone.
The high wages they will require will hamstring that club a long time, and in the end they’ll have unhappy footballers at the end of it.
The Aribo fee scares them because there’s less interest in Morelos or Kent than there was in the Nigerian. Which means that they might have to settle for even less in cash terms for those two. When Kenny Miller came out in the media the other day and said that in his view Morelos is worth only £6 million that infuriated Ibrox fans, but all Miller did is acknowledge a hard fact which their supporters are still finding difficult to reconcile themselves to. Nobody is going to pay much more than that for a guy who has played in Scotland for five seasons and has yet to hit 20 league goals in a campaign. Morelos’ SPL return is 67 goals over that time.
For context, Odsonne Edouard hit 66 goals in the league for us, and he did it in three and half seasons. On top of that are all those French Under 21 goals which are what really made the world sit up and take notice of the big guy.
Instead of getting rid of these players for the big money they’d hoped for, they’ve sold one for a fee that their fans ought to be spitting blood about and are ready to offer the two others they wanted off the books hugely inflated salaries and minimum release clauses which the players themselves now control.
It is a massive admission of failure and an enormous strategic blunder which sends out a very clear signal to the rest of football; Ibrox’s players are yours for the taking, going cheap.
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