He’s better than Auro, Laryea and Deleon, but he’s also old and had a terrible season this year at Arsenal...
I’d be surprised if this wasn’t “retiring player wants to play in MLS ergo TFC because they pay the most money thereby driving up valuation of said retiring player.”
I know we think about this often and certainly we always want the product to get better but over time I think it’s good to have perspective of how things change.
Year 1 - terrible quality of play, local feel to club, reasonable ticket prices, players good people (but not exactly talented).
Now: better quality of play, less community feel, moderately priced tickets, mild douche factor for players (see: tinder)
Distant Future (at some point): much better quality of play, expensive tickets, players very talented also very separated from fans.
So I hear Diego Godin is available this summer for free. I would back up the Brinks truck for that.
Last edited by Richard; 05-15-2019 at 11:04 AM.
Genk won the Belgian league. Let's pillage more from their roster.
Difference between Curtis and Bez: David Accam. Curtis thinks the trade market is dry, Bez lands Accam. Bez then flips Accam to Nashville in 2020. Total cost to Bez 50k plus an international spot. Meanwhile we're still waiting for the right guy.
Oh, its a Bez thing alright & he is a way better deal maker then Curtis.
But the teams have said that 3 way trade was being worked on before the trade deadline and was always the plan.
If we are going to compare - Curtis best move so far, apart from him & Manning landing Poz, was the Hagglund deal - he's now on the bench & in no way worth that allocation spot & $300K in TAM & GAM.
"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
That is a bunch of unfounded supposition. That free form story telling they were doing to relate the Poz transfer story did not sound like two people covering up for each other. They both knew the facts and were even helping each other remember them. Manning even left the interview to verify information from his email.
So unless you have third party sourcing that tells you Curtis screwed up, he is the dilligent magic worker that got a fantastic DP over the line in record time just like his boss said. DP deals usually take 6 months or more to pull together. That is why Carlos Vela ended up in LA so far I. Advance of LA actually playing soccer. Manning stated in the interview that the extra couple of million was there to make Genk happy, to give them some kind of win, so that they could both keep their heads up and avoid court.
Outside of the DP deals though our hands are tied by budget, we can't just go throwing more money at the problem because of the salary budget. Getting deals done takes time. I would rather get it right slowly than wrong quickly. We were fortunate that Poz worked bout both fast and good. That is the exception not the norm
Look at Portland. Brian Fernandez was a transfer at least three windows and many targets long. And that is for a DP that they were willing to pay 10 million for.
Last edited by bought with blo; 05-17-2019 at 06:23 AM.
I won't give massive kudos for the Poz deal. Credit for identifying the player and salvaging the transfer. But, due diligence? Efficiency? Execution? Really really poor.
And DP deals don't take 6 months unless you're being entirely anal about the player you want. Bradley took days.
Last edited by portu; 05-17-2019 at 06:22 AM.
The Bradley discussions with MLS started months before - his agent was actively looking around in the fall. IIRC, Toronto came in later and basically trumped every other team with the $ involved. I believe the scuttlebutt at the time was Bradley was going to Chicago.
There are rumours Seattle did the same thing to Chicago with Dempsey.
Returning MLS and also USMNT players are a different case due to the allocation order even if MLS decides to circumvent that rule like with Bradley.
The due diligence was done by the scouting department. If getting the deal done fast is not good enough I am unsure what else he needed to do. Getting the number one target outside the primary European transfer window without burning bridges seems like a good bit of work to me. Especially since a champions league contender was turned into not a contender sue to our interference. We got one of the Belgian leagues best players in under two months without hurt feelings I don't know how that is poor execution.
No third party telling me anything. But it's not unfounded.
TFC/MLS had no business unilaterally moving on a player who had sent an email affirming he wouldn’t trigger his release clause, and also said that publicly.
I don’t know if it's Curtis or the MLS league office who screwed the pooch there, but suspect it's Curtis, as he was on the ground in Belgium for weeks, as Manning and Curtis both told us.
"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
What I hated most about that saga was the journos saying that "this is how it works in the big leagues". It really obviously isn't. Legal issues aren't normal.
I think Ensco's referring to the fact that we approached the player as if we triggered the release clause, which was unjustified because it was inactive.
It might also be worth noting that the active interpretation of his situation might have been brought on by him or his agent.
All we know is we wanted the guy and thought we had a strong negotiation position, his team leveraged theirs for all they could and here we are - he walked away for 2m more than the release clause when their season was on the line. No "legal issues", nothing but both sides negotiating around a weird contract situation. And if one side 'won' it was certainly us, they didn't want him to walk for 10m if they could have avoided it.
Bottom line, front office delivered a DP who is one of the league's top performers in a short space of time (what, two months after Seba left?) At a time when it was very difficult to sign him given his team's position and for 10m which is probably below his market value. Push baseless speculation aside and look at what we know, that's great work and I'm delighted with it. Good job all round
No it isn’t. FFS. Really?
The Belgians buy and sell players all day. They were the grown ups in this, we were the children.
We moved on this without talking to the club (or reading the newspapers, it seems). I guess we relied solely on representations by Pozo's agent. Didn’t talk to the club. Is that your idea of how world football works?
Genk were extremely torqued. Did you even read one of the stories over there? They let him go because no one keeps a player against his will, plus they got 2M extra compensation.
We are very fortunate that this didn’t tank their season, or this would have blighted TFC/MLS for years in Europe.
Last edited by ensco; 05-17-2019 at 08:09 AM.
"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
That is my idea of how football works, yes, it is in fact how football works. You think transfers happen without clubs talking to the players first? It's an open secret, didn't Jaap Stam get moved on from United for talking about it in his autobiography? You think Real Madrid first spoke to Cristiano Ronaldo in 2009?
Genk can be torqued all they want. Their season being tanked would have been irrelevant, clubs do business because it's in their interest to do so, if it is in future clubs interest to do business with us they'll do it. Real Madrid and Barcelona openly tap up players all the time, their presidents run on election campaigns of buying players (Literally publicly stating I will buy this player if elected), Arsenal used legal loopholes to pry Cesc Fabregas away from Barcelona as a kid when they invested money in his development and Barcelona in turn publicly courted him to get him back - anybody refusing to do business with them? Are they blighted?
Yeah the "agent talked to another team first" thing happened to us with Seba & VV & in some ways with both Bradley & Defoe.
It's not that TFC talked to the agent before the team, it's that they never talked to the team before making the offer.
"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
You think Florentino Pérez spoke to Man United and agreed a deal before he promised Cristiano Ronaldo? Do you think Arsenal spoke to Barcelona when they used Spanish employment law to get Cesc Fabregas? Did PSG speak to Barcelona before Neymar showed up with a 200m cheque? We know Man United agreed a deal with Jaap Stam before he signed as he himself admitted it. Is anyone refusing to do business with these teams?
Football isn't North American sports, it's not one big co-op but independent free market capitalist teams. Nobody would care if Genks season tanked, nobody would even remember it, business is binary - If TFC wanted a player from team x, team x has an amount they'd sell them for, if TFC meet it, player goes. Money talks and our cheques dont bounce, This is how football works, that's all teams care about
Last edited by JoesphNdo; 05-17-2019 at 11:46 AM.
^You are wrong. The buyer may have had a provisional deal in place with Fabregas or Ronaldo or whomever, but I am saying that in every case you cite above there was some interaction between the two clubs before the legal docs (usually notice of termination) were executed.
In. every. case.
If you think we gave Genk and additional 2M euros because we are nice guys, well... you are welcome to your opinion.
"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