Soteldo news has been all over the place.
Here are what has been confirmed to be facts about the original transfer. I've seen so much confusion on how much we own of his rights.
1) We currently own 75% of Soteldo's rights. (Huachipato in Chile, Soteldo's former club, owns the other 25%).
2) Santos only ever owned 50% of his rights. They bought 50% of his rights from Huachipato.
3) Santos never paid their original $3.5 million fee to Huachipato.
4) When we bought Soteldo, we bought 50% from Santos and 25% from Huachipato. Those were two separate negotiations. One negotiation with Huachipato. One negotiation with Santos. They did not need to be comparable and proportional values. Apparently Toronto sent $3 million to each of Santos and Huachipato for their 50% and 25% shares respectively.
5) Santos was facing a transfer ban from FIFA for not paying Huachipato. All of the $6 million fee Toronto paid went to Huachipato. Santos sent their entire proceeds to Huachipato, plus will pay an additional $500,000 (in installments) - which matches with the reported $3 million Santos got in point 4, plus $500k = $3.5 original fee. The sale covered the never-paid payment and eliminated the transfer ban because they no longer owed another club money.
6) Santos retained a 12.5% sell-on clause on a future Soteldo sale. (So Santos should get a portion of this transfer fee if we sell to Sao Paulo, which they'll probably end up sending to Huachipato again as one of their "installments")
Here are speculations and explanations for the current transfer rumours.
- Sao Paulo wants to buy 50%. We'd remain with 25% (Huachipato still owns 25%) That's not a loan. That's not a sell-on clause. It's asset ownership. See point 4 above. A sell-on clause is what we did with Richie and Nottingham Forest. If Nottingham sells Richie, we get whatever X% we agreed to now - we are not involved in the negotiation. We get whatever X% of what Nottingham negotiates in their sale. If Sao Paulo sells Soteldo, we can negotiate our own price with the buying club for our 25% in a negotiation we are involved in.
-If Sao Paulo *buys* 50%, Soteldo is not our player. It's not a loan. A purchase is a purchase, he would not return to being a TFC player. If it's a *loan* he'd come back, unless it's a loan with an obligation to buy (like PSG with Mbappe, which happens when a team wants to buy a player but due to FFP regulations, they might not be able to buy him this window, so they defer it to next year as a loophole)
-Sao Paulo is offering a contract worth less than the $1.9 million we are paying him. This does not necessarily mean we have to pay the difference. When there is a transfer, a new contract is written, it's not a straight takeover of the contract. Richie was due to be paid $200,000 by us in 2022. Richie is going to make a hell of a lot more in Nottingham. His TFC contract was ripped up and replaced. Since a new contract gets written, just like a higher salary can be negotiated, theoretically a lower salary can be negotiated as well - Pique did that for Barcelona (not a transfer, but he still ripped up the old contract and took less)
-With that said, Soteldo is entitled to his current $1.9 million in the sense that he does not have to agree to a transfer. He can stay and he is perfectly entitled to stay with Toronto and collect his $1.9 million. He can say I want $1.9 million. I don't care who pays it, but I want $1.9 million. This is what you hear about all the time where a former team pays part of a player's salary after a transfer. The new team doesn't want to pay his current salary, the player doesn't want to take a lower salary, the old team really wants out of the contract, so they agree to pay the difference between the new and old contract. It's kind of like the Julio Cesar loan here, we only paid a portion of his contract, while QPR paid the balance (although since that was a loan it was still his QPR contract)
Here is my complete speculation and own thoughts based on the whole mess of conflicting and confusing reports (and I could be completely wrong):
-Now if Soteldo really wants out, he might agree to a lower salary. If Sao Paulo is offering say $1 million, Toronto might be telling Soteldo, we're not paying you the 900k. We'll either pay you $1.9 million to play for Toronto or pay you Zero and you go to Sao Paulo. That's the negotiation. How much does he want out? This is what I think is happening and makes sense given the reports of the "Toronto debt" aka the bonus. Soteldo might be okay with the lower salary to get out of Toronto, if he can get his deferred signing bonus. There is no way Toronto will retain a DP/TAM level salary on the books (which would count to the salary cap and take up space), so Toronto is playing hardball since they know Soteldo wants out. They're probably trying to convince MLS to let that signing bonus count to last year's cap because it's a "signing bonus" so should be allocated to the year of signing. MLSPA says his base salary is $1.5 million and guaranteed is $1.965 million That $465,000 might be the signing bonuses (it's never been clarified what the difference between base and guaranteed on the MLSPA site).
Last edited by rydermike; 01-10-2022 at 09:19 PM. Reason: typos
The Soteldo reporting in Brazil is all over the place. I really want this to be over quick.
Disagree vehemently. Not buying it. This is a screw up with monumental implications. If Dwyer’s salary was big enough to cause this , Manning has to have signed off. Or it’s a dereliction of duty.
These President/GM structures, which I have derided many times over the years, are just clusterf$&@$s- ways for people to create a way to blame others for things that properly belong to them. At least we sort of got rid of that.
"There are some people who might have better technique than me, and some may be fitter than me, but the main thing is tactics. With most players, tactics are missing. You can divide tactics into insight, trust, and daring." - Johan Cruyff
Check out this tweet at https://twitter.com/brunoandrd/status/1480637168909529089?s=20
I'm not sure how much I trust these reports, as others have also said that while three clubs (including us) are interested, they've lowered their asking price from $5M to $3M already (dollars, not Euros). Wolves would easily be able to pull that off if they were really in on this, and Palmeiras has had serious money problems for months, so it's hard to believe they'd ever be in on the bidding.
It seems like Tigres is trying to play this as a big-money transfer and we may be the only ones actually interested.
It's normally a Charlie Foxtrot without proper risk & governance and clear roles and responsibilities at the senior levels. It's beyond Manning to be honest. It's the MLSE organizational dysfunction on display.
Manning was busy with other non-TFC activities and power plays, didn't have priority and went what's quick and worked in the past in Curtis. Gave him the key to TFC kingdom and resumed his other pursuits.
Curtis found an equally qualified person he sees in his own image Armas. It hit the fan on such spectacular level that Manning had to immediately seize control to rectify the situation.
Manning did fix the situation rather effectively with what he can, and what he thinks Bob Bradley can with dual roles.
HOWEVER, the lack of risk & governance and due process still remains in MLSE. It's like a roulette on what you end up with. That's not a predictable and sustainable operating model for long term dynasty level play.
It could change, but we are in no vantage points to ever find out.
I am now formally changing my rating of Curtis from F+ to Z-.
He can sit right next to Mo Johnston as one of the two worst GM's in our history. This off-season really has shed light to just how badly the team was run, and run off a cliff.
Also, not that it matters, but Armas deserves a lot of blame for this. This whole story will be too subtle for 97% of Manchester United fans to understand, but he should be fired today from that job, just because of what happened here.
Do they actually want the guy who made this call to tell Cristiano Ronaldo about football?
"There are some people who might have better technique than me, and some may be fitter than me, but the main thing is tactics. With most players, tactics are missing. You can divide tactics into insight, trust, and daring." - Johan Cruyff
The English papers are all reporting that the same shit is just happening there. The Express and the Guardian both had stories that the team has split into cliques, and the pricier players who don't want to gegenpress are already saying Armas can't teach them.
https://www.theguardian.com/football...chester-united
The specific concern was that while he's teaching them to press, he's not teaching them how to convert that into offensive movement once they have the ball back. They don't respect him so they're not learning, basically. But that locker room is an egotistical shitshow, sort of the EPL version of us.
It was precisely the wrong environment for him to go into.
Last edited by jloome; 01-10-2022 at 11:04 PM.
I was shaking my head when watching the FA cup game today. Armas was all up in Rangnick's ear giving him advice on the touchline. Rangnick must really be naïve, I just cant understand what the hell ManU are doing.
This is like the exact thing that I observed here. I saw lots of other similarities too. When they played Newcastle, the midfield was entirely ineffective at stopping the counter and there were massive gaps between the lines.
This whole philosophy, whether it’s Armas or Rangnick, it’s just all nonsense. You don’t dogmatically drop into a team and suddenly take a formation or style of play out of the box and expect to be successful. You have to look at what you have to work with, what the environment is, and what the opportunities are. Then figure out a direction for the team that suits it’s strengths or otherwise gives you the best chance to be successful. That doesn’t mean you abandon what you know entirely but it’s more complicated than some cookie-cutter setup.
I still remember Curtis and Armas and all their Red Bull references. What a couple of clueless dolts. You wouldn’t show up in the kitchen in a Michelin Star restaurant and make hay about how you ran the grill at McDonalds.
Yeah, exactly. The times gegenpress has been successful falls into two camps: overwhelmingly strong teams that would probably win even without it, and minnows where the players are all so mediocre at a pro level that they'll take a lemming-like approach to following instruction (the NYRB effect).
His prior career successes, other than one cup win, were all in getting low-level clubs promoted. When the team will behave like a singular automaton (and he learned it off a Soviet Club, so...) it works. When they have the talent to make up for its tactical and coaching shortfalls, it works.
Every other instance (Us, Liepzig, now Man utd) it creates more problems than it helps resolve.
EDIT: Worth noting that Bruce Arena, Bob's mentor, teaches a high recovery press to his players as well. But it's disciplined.
The Tajon outcome is an outlier, Superdraft isn't what it used to be, but have a look at good teams, most of them of have 2-3 key, cheap drafted players, making an important contribution on low wages. Making the draft work is critical to the model.
This Dwyer thing, it's Knicks/Dolan level bad (this won't make sense to non-NBA types here).
I haven't felt this down about TFC leadership since Anselmi/Cochrane. I hope the outcome of all this is that only Bob has his hands on the steering wheel now.
I appreciate Insigne, but MLSE basically sent over a draft contract and told Insigne to fill in the number. I know who to thank for that, thank you Larry (and maybe Masai) and I am genuinely excited to see him in TFC red. But nothing in that tells me anything about anyone's ability to figure anything out.
"There are some people who might have better technique than me, and some may be fitter than me, but the main thing is tactics. With most players, tactics are missing. You can divide tactics into insight, trust, and daring." - Johan Cruyff
Man U thought they were getting a Klopp/Tuchel like manager but both of them have adapted gegenpress tactics and moved beyond it. Plus they can man manage. Or at least Klopp can. Man U is playing a 4-2-2-2. No wonder the players don’t know what to do. Ragnarok is a dolt.
My first thought about Dwyer was, "He only effin joined in the summer!"
Apparently it was May but still.
My gawd, that has to be in the top 10 stupidest moves ever at TFC
New England set an MLS points record on the back of a team primarily built through the draft.
Giving up the #3 pick could really hurt in the future. Hell, remember the Kyle Bekker and Emery Welshman draft year? Andrew Farrell, everyone's consensus #1 pick that year, and the player TFC had to be brain dead not to select, has played 272 games for New England since being drafted in 2013. That's not even getting into the fact Walker Zimmerman was drafted #7.
The draft may not be what it once was, but man oh man can players still find some gems there.
That reminds me, Kevin Payne was an idiot.
Ensco do you know what the delegations of authority are within MLSE’s governance structure? I wouldn’t say that Manning has to sign off. Based on my experience, granted it’s a different setting, I could easily see this being within a threshold that does not require Mannings approval. But I’m also speculating.
Absolutely horrendous contract though.