Motherwell need to be careful with their Lennon Miller valuation. That can end badly.

Every club wants a good price for its best players if they are going to leave the club. Motherwell are no exception. A report last night suggested that they are asking for £7.5 million for Lennon Miller. That’s perfectly fine if you have a list of clubs clamouring for his signature. It is dangerous if you do not.

What’s even more dangerous is what happens if you have a handful of clubs involved and none has made a bid in that region.

Remember the analogy I used about the Hitler Diaries some weeks ago?

When they were offered for sale Stern, the company that owned the rights to them, offered them to Newsweek and to Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. They both made offers. When he tried to play them off against each other, both walked. The deal Murdoch finally cut with Stern was a fraction of what he had initially offered. That’s Bad Negotiating 101 right there.

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate that figure. £7.5 million. For a kid who, yes, has talent—plenty of it—but who has done nowhere near enough yet in the game to justify that price tag. This isn’t me being disrespectful to the lad. Quite the opposite. I rate him. I’ve written several times that Lennon Miller has all the tools to be an outstanding footballer. But let’s live in the real world here.

Motherwell are walking a tightrope. There’s a line between getting fair value for a young talent and pricing yourself out of a sale. This is a mistake the club from across town has made, and one they’ve made repeatedly.

And I wonder if anyone at Fir Park has stopped to consider just how precarious their position is here. You can only bluff the table for so long before someone calls your hand—and there might not be another one coming after that.

Miller has had a good season. Not spectacular, but good. He’s won the Young Player awards; those guys have ended up at Celtic a bunch of times in the past. He’s shown maturity beyond his years, and it’s obvious why people are excited about him. But let’s not pretend we’re talking about a player who has dominated the league or who’s been turning in eight-out-of-ten performances every week. There’s promise, sure. There’s potential. But potential doesn’t always equal payout, especially when you’re talking seven figures in the Scottish market.

That price tag? That’s a Premier League tax. That’s a number they’ve plucked out of the air in the hope that some rich English club will throw silly money at them just to say they’ve secured the “next big thing.”

It might also be designed to scare Celtic away; indeed, I think we should think twice before even considering a fee in that region.

It’s the same game that a lot of smaller clubs in this country try to play. They see a club in Scotland sell someone for a big fee and get the idea that the sky is the limit.

What does Miller have? A couple dozen games and a bunch of decent write-ups? That doesn’t scream “multi-million-pound transfer” to me. At least, not yet.

Now here’s the kicker for Motherwell: they could get good money for him. In fact, they almost certainly will. That big, though? They’re risking a lot by starting the bidding so high, and Scottish clubs are notoriously bad at negotiating transfers.

They either give players away for peanuts or ask for such ludicrous sums that they scare off all serious suitors. There’s no in-between. No sense of nuance or market reality. And that’s what Motherwell need here. A little bit of perspective.

Clubs in England and Europe are already wary of buying from Scotland. They know the level isn’t great and that players who look like world-beaters here can often struggle when they move on.

If you start throwing around daft price tags, you just reinforce those doubts. You make clubs think, “Why should we gamble on a player from a team that finished mid-table in the SPFL when we can get someone from Ligue 1 or the Eredivisie for less?” That’s the competition Motherwell are up against, even if they refuse to see it.

It’s also why we might balk at that fee. Are there better options out there, in his area of the pitch, for a fee like that? Of course there are. We know there are. In fact, it’s the fact he plays in Scotland that gives Motherwell their one advantage in negotiating with Celtic if we are interested. A kid like this could anchor our midfield for a decade, counting as a home grown player in the Champions League.

Motherwell also know they can ask us to pay a wee bit more because their fans will demand that to let him go to a club here. That’s a well trodden path. Even that doesn’t always end well though. It doesn’t always guarantee that they’ll get a good deal. I think Hibs could have gotten more from us for John McGinn than they got from Villa; their belligerent stance met with Lawwell’s bad poker skills and we all know how that ended.

Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that someone does come in for Miller. Maybe a lower-end Premier League side or a Championship club with money to burn. They’re not going to pay £7.5 million upfront. Not a chance. It’ll be a structured deal, most likely, with add-ons and clauses that only trigger if the kid actually becomes the player people think he might be. And those clauses might never be met.

So what are Motherwell really doing here? They’re setting expectations that they almost certainly won’t meet, which can only end in disappointment.

Worse still, if no club matches that valuation—and I doubt any will—they run the risk of unsettling the player.

Miller knows what’s being said about him. Of course he does. You think he doesn’t have ambitions to move on, to test himself at a higher level? If Motherwell block that by clinging to a fantasy number, how long before his head goes? How long before he starts wondering if his own club is holding him back?

This isn’t just about what a player is worth in isolation. It’s about timing. It’s about the market. It’s about opportunity. If a club like Celtic were to come in for Miller, for example, Motherwell might do better to think long-term. Take a lower up-front fee but negotiate a sell-on clause. Get a good chunk of cash now and gamble on the lad going for big money in two or three years. That’s how smaller clubs make real money off transfers. That’s how they play the game smart.

Instead, Motherwell are acting like they’re holding all the cards. They aren’t. They’ve got a good player, not a superstar. They’re a club with limited financial muscle and no leverage beyond a contract. They need to be careful they don’t end up with a disillusioned youngster stuck in their squad because nobody’s willing to meet a fantasy price. That would benefit no-one.

Motherwell need to be very careful. They’ve got a bright young talent who might well go on to have a great career. But if they overplay their hand, they might just find themselves with a player who wants to leave, a dressing room full of unrest, and a transfer window that closes without the injection of cash that would let them sign replacements.

Valuing your assets is one thing. Inflating them beyond all reason is quite another. You don’t get to set the market—you react to it. If they want £7.5 million, they’d better hope someone’s daft enough to pay it.

This might not end well.