- Manchester City have completed the signing of Nigel de Jong from Hamburg for a reported Stg17m.
- Emerson, who plays with Kaka in Milan, has said the former Manchester City target will join Real Madrid in the summer.
- Florent Malouda has been linked with a move to Villarreal.
[quote=“Bandage”]I don’t oppose Celtic’s new transfer strategy per se. It’s what big clubs from smaller leagues like Ajax, FC Porto and the like have been doing for years - signing young, hungry talent and then selling him then on for substantial profit to more lucrative leagues after you’ve gotten decent service out of them. You could argue Celtic did it inadvertently with Stan Petrov too.
As mentioned before, UK work permit laws are much stricter than on the continent (player X has to have broken into his senior international squad etc) so Celtic aren’t going to be able to making a signing such as PSV getting Ronaldo as a 17-year old for example. They’re more restricted to the EU market (free movement of labour!), hence the signings of young players from Switzerland and Czech Republic mentioned in that article.
That said, I reckon Celtic need to mix it up a bit. I was gagging for a commanding, experienced centre back in the summer but it wasn’t to be. I can’t help thinking that if all the money that’s been spent on fees and wages for the likes of Hutchinson, McGinn, McCourt, Loovens et al was pooled together we could have gone to 5m or 6m to get a tough cunt to play at the back.
Ched Evans doesn’t excite me too much either - I’m conscious of Aliadiere, Hutchinson and Riordan and, again, I would hold off on spending 1.2m plus wages for a squad player and instead pool this money to go and get someone who’ll make a real difference to the first team.[/quote]
We were initially linked with Evans on loan and I was dead set against that. Buying him would be a different story though. Haven’t seen that much of him but he looks decent. If we could get him in and get rid of Killen it would be a nice bit of business.
I agree that we need to buy a bit more quality and experience - signings like Jan who have a proven European quality but aren’t going to command stellar fees. If we’d adopted the current strategy in the past then we’d have missed out on gems like Larsson and Moravcik. There is plenty of room for squad development but hopefully that doesn’t curtail our ambitions in terms of getting experience in.
[quote=“therock67”]We were initially linked with Evans on loan and I was dead set against that. Buying him would be a different story though. Haven’t seen that much of him but he looks decent. If we could get him in and get rid of Killen it would be a nice bit of business.
I agree that we need to buy a bit more quality and experience - signings like Jan who have a proven European quality but aren’t going to command stellar fees. If we’d adopted the current strategy in the past then we’d have missed out on gems like Larsson and Moravcik. There is plenty of room for squad development but hopefully that doesn’t curtail our ambitions in terms of getting experience in.[/quote]
lubo & larsson were the best bit of business Celtic done in years- what has happened to their scouting network - bring back davie hay who got cadette dicanio pierre & thom all reltively cheap
Lubo and Dr Jo apparently recommended Milan Misun but I don’t know what this John Park, Head of Football Development, spends his time doing. He must be a keen watcher of LOI games involving Derry City and EPL reserve games.
& have a season ticket for Hibs
arent lubo & doctor Jo on the payroll
Heard a few rumours from Birmingham yesterday that Liverpools deal to sign Heskey in the summer has stalled and he will sign for Villa today…Please God no!!!
Heskey to Villa makes so much sense to me, O Neill, Villa, it just all clicks. Can see it happening.
Hesky and Villa are about the same level. No way he should be going to one of the big 4 clubs.
I dunno Heskey has made absolute shit of world class centre backs like Walter Samuel, he surely would an improvement on the likes of Marlon Harewood
Oh sweet Jesus no…not another MON ‘bargain’
How the world’s biggest transfer fell apartGarry Cook, Manchester City’s executive chairman, has criticised Milan after the 91m Kaka saga ended in dismay
Daniel Taylor
The Guardian, Wednesday 21 January 2009
From start to finish the Kaka transfer saga took 34 days. Photograph: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images
From start to finish, the whole process took 34 days. It was 15 December when Manchester City’s executive chairman, Garry Cook, first made contact with Milan. “I’ll come out with this straight away,” he said over the phone to Adriano Galliani, the club’s vice-president. “We want your best player and I’m ringing up to see how much you want for him.”
Galliani listened and said he would speak to Silvio Berlusconi, the *president. Later that day, a fax came through to Cook’s office. It was signed by Galliani and told him Kaka was available if City “delivered the sum of 200 million”. Cook jokingly faxed back: “Is that lira?”
The important thing was that Milan were willing to do business. Cook reported the breakthrough to Sheikh Mansour, the club’s owner, and Mark Hughes, the *manager. A six-man team, including three lawyers, was put together, and so began the exhaustive process of trying to conclude perhaps the most audacious transfer of all time. So where did it all go wrong and how did it reach the stage that City should get their fingers burned so badly?
Those are questions that Cook was still asking himself yesterday as he and Simon Pearce, Sheikh Mansour’s personal envoy, tried to make sense of it all. It has been a chastening experience and has led to concerns about Robinho’s future in Manchester, and Cook did not mince his words. “They bottled it,” he says of Milan. “We weren’t naive. It was just that the world we entered into was unprofessional. We engaged a lot of professional people to take care of this deal. But it was all a bit too sophisticated for Milan.”
Milan have been on their own PR *offensive, of course. According to the *Italians, the decision was purely Kaka’s and he chose to turn down City because he could not bear the idea of leaving San Siro. Kaka himself has said it “took only 30 seconds to make up my mind”.
Cook’s is a very different take. “We never met the player and we simply didn’t make an offer [of personal terms] to Kaka,” he said. “All of which makes it difficult for us to swallow the suggestion that he rejected Manchester City. There was nothing to reject.”
What we can say for certain is that it is a lesson in the complexities of what it is like to negotiate the transfer of a *genuine superstar and the minefield of legalities, politics, agents, interpreters and egos.
City, for instance, have documents to show that, by the time the transfer window opened on 1 January, a fee had been agreed for the Brazilian. Milan had slashed their initial asking price to 91m, to be paid in five instalments. A confidentiality agreement had been signed and the vibes were so positive Hughes, had gone as far as planning a new 4–1–4–1 formation, with Kaka playing in his best position as an advanced central midfielder.
By the time Cook boarded a private jet back to Manchester after the first face-to-face talks between himself, other high-ranking City officials and the Milan hierarchy, he and his colleagues were in a celebratory mood. “They [Milan] had made it quite clear that they wanted to sell their prize possession to us,” he claims.
But this was only the first part of what Cook calls “a three-stage process” and it is the second phase where it gets increasingly complicated.
First, the story was leaked. Cook blames Milan for this, although various people at the City end may have been loose-lipped, too. Either way, it meant a flood of protests in Milan and, by the time Cook’s team arrived in the city on Monday to meet Galliani and Bosco Leite, Kaka’s father and agent, there were thousands of fans on the streets. “After that, the pressure was building on Milan,” says Cook. “There was political pressure on Milan and supporter pressure. You could feel that pressure on the senior executives. The confidentiality should never have been broken.”
Even so, City remained optimistic. They had been led to believe that Kaka was keen to come and excited about their plans. City, in turn, were prepared to make him the highest paid footballer in the world. But first – and this is really the crux – they wanted to do due diligence on the player’s contract and commercial income.
“You like to know what you are getting before you make your offer to the player,” Cook says. “We were trying to run through a professional process to understand. Kaka has a number of sponsors and complex agreements and inside those agreements are clauses that could affect the needs of his sponsors. That part had to be agreed before we could get to offering personal terms with the player. But his representatives simply didn’t want to get to the complexities and the sophistication of the second stage.”
City’s representatives asked Bosco if they could look at his son’s financial documents and the complexities of his different sponsorship agreements. “No,” they were allegedly told. “Not even Milan get to see them.” Cook says: “They just didn’t get where we were coming from.”
Kaka, City did establish, earns 12m a year after tax with a further 7m-8m from commercial revenue. Cook was once in charge of the Michael Jordan brand at Nike, estimated he could increase Kaka’s endorsements 10-fold. “But all they wanted was to talk about salary and compensation for the player. They simply couldn’t answer the questions.”
The talks lasted seven hours and ended with an agreement that they would meet again the following morning and then arrange a further meeting in London. Yet Cook had picked up bad vibes when he spoke to Galliani in private. “He [Galliani] said his life had changed since the story had come out,” says Cook. "He had had to move offices and employ protection.
“What really set the alarm bells ringing was that he also said they had already figured out with Kaka that they would come out with a joint statement saying they were pleased to say he was staying. They clearly had a strategy in place.”
Everything came to a head when Cook received a call in the departure lounge at Linate airport. The man on the line was Alberto Zilani, a translator for Kaka’s father, Bosco. There was, in Pearce’s words, a “sudden change in emphasis”.
According to Pearce, it was put to City that they needed to let Bosco know exactly what salary Kaka would earn, and that if they did not do it immediately the deal was in jeopardy. “There was a requirement for much more speed and a much greater focus on cash,” he says. “Garry’s response was that’s not the way we wanted to conduct the talks and we would have to terminate the discussions there.”
Cook went to ring Hughes to break the bad news. Milan, meanwhile, went into overdrive. “Garry got the telephone call at 11.03pm,” says Pearce. “Within eight minutes Mr Berlusconi had called the most popular live television show in Italy and said, ‘I have great news for you. Kaka has rejected the offer’. Then, suddenly, Kaka is out on his balcony waving to the Milan fans. They had got everything covered.”
The meeting took place at the offices of Milan’s lawyers and Cook felt that City were unwelcome. “We were confined to a room with no food or drink. We were starving by the time it finished. They gave us a cup of coffee so it would be unfair to say there was nothing. But the hospitality wasn’t the finest. It was interesting to see how they worked. The dynamics of it were strange, very unnerving. It wasn’t a place we would want to be in.”
He’ll fit in well in the Premiership
De Jong is a successful entrepreneur in his own right, a true self-made man. He has a highly successful car dealership with an Iranian business partner, adding a little extra ‘bling’ to the most sought after marques.
In Hamburg, he bought a tennis complex and converted it into a giant showroom full of jazzed-up Ferraris, Mercedes and Aston Martins and counts his good friend Robin van Persie and a smattering of Real Madrid stars as his clients.
City missed out on Henry, Buffon & Villa
Manchester City’s aborted bid for Brazilian superstar Kaka was preceded by failed attempts to sign Gianluigi Buffon, Thierry Henry and the Valencia pair David Villa and David Silva, it emerged on Thursday.
None of the moves got as far as the attempt to sign Kaka with the players’ current clubs all quoting exorbitant prices in an attempt to make the most of City’s newfound wealth.
The move for Henry could be resurrected at the end of the season, however, when Barcelona may be willing to sell the former Arsenal striker for considerably less than the 25million they reportedly quoted City for a January deal.
That was a price City were unwilling to meet for a 31-year-old with a record of recurring injuries in recent seasons.
Henry, whose daughter lives in England with his ex-wife, has indicated that he could be keen on a return to the Premier League at some stage.
Juventus indicated they would be willing to sell Buffon, regarded as the world’s best goalkeeper, but only for 100million, while Valencia wanted 135million for Spain duo Villa and Silva, according to newspaper reports.
‘We’re not anybody’s fool,’ City’s executive chairman, Garry Cook, was quoted as telling reporters.
‘We’ve turned down negotiations for three different players because we felt the demands both from the club and, in essence, the players have been ludicrous.’
Cook is adamant that City will not squander the money of their owner, Sheikh Mansour, but any suggestion that they do not overpay for players already looks debatable.
City have this month spent a total of 40million on Wayne Bridge, formerly Chelsea’s reserve left-back, Craig Bellamy, a striker who has managed only five goals this season, and Nigel de Jong, who was their third choice for a new holding player behind Barcelona’s Yaya Toure and Lassana Diarra, who opted to join Real Madrid instead.
Meanwhile, manager Mark Hughes has been left with a real headache over how to deal with the highest-profile player currently on his staff, Robinho.
The Brazilian is due back in Manchester next week after leaving the club’s warm weather training camp in Tenerife without permission.
The forward flew home to Santos on a private jet and has since claimed he had to deal with a pressing family matter.
That has cut little ice with City officials who say the player will be disciplined on his return and the club have failed to quell speculation that Robinho’s walkout was linked to the collapse of the Kaka deal and a feeling that City’s grand ambitions are unlikely to be realised.
The player however has moved to limit the damage caused by his unauthorised trip by insisting he was committed to the club.
‘I have a good relationship with Mark Hughes and have always respected his decisions,’ Robinho stated on his official website. ‘He is the boss!’
The former Real Madrid star also said he was enjoying his new life in England.
‘I like living in Manchester and I have made many friends at the club and at the city, since I arrived last year,’ he said.
'I admire the Manchester City fans, who are true lovers of football and loyal to the players.
‘I am looking forward to delivering as many goals as possible to help our team move to the next level’.
Thank fuck for that
Robinho should ask Stephen Ireland for a few excuses to explain his recent departure.
Marlon King has joined Middlesbrough on loan
Wigan have made a bid for Steven Hunt
[quote=“The Puke”]Marlon King has joined Middlesbrough on loan
Wigan have made a bid for Steven Hunt[/quote]
He’d be better off staying at Reading.
[quote=“The Puke”]Marlon King has joined Middlesbrough on loan
Wigan have made a bid for Steven Hunt[/quote]
Mido is gone the other way. Now with Wigan
Craig Bellamy to Man City for 14 million.
West ham have done the best bit of business on the whole window.
They have doubled their money for a 29 year old injury prone Absolute prick.
Genius.
Another ‘one for the future’:
http://www.soccerpie.com/scout/petar-skuletic-at-celtic/
Petar Skuletic at Celtic
It looks like Partizan is selling everything they have in the youth squad this winter. After Miralem Sulejmani left the club before signing the first proffesional contract leaving the Partizan bank account with only 250.00$, it looks like Partizan decided to sell the kids before they decide to leave. After SUlejmani, Gulan has been sold to Fiorentina, and just a couple of weeks ago Tosic and Ljajic both signed for Manchester United. Petar Skuletic is another name from their youth ranks and the rumours are that he just signed for Celtic.
Skuletic is 18 years old forward, pretty tall (1.90) and strong. He is already in Serbian U19, even he is born in Montenegro and has the option to play for them. Scouts could see him at UEFA Tournament in Northern Ireland during the summer, when Serbian team crashed both England and hosts. In the U19 team, Skuletic is behind top talents Aleksic and Milic, but he proved to be great talent as well. Also, at 4th U-17 Quixote Tropheo, Skuletic took the Top Scorer award with 7 goals playing in the same team with Ljajic. Partizan took third place at that tournament, but trashed Barcelona by 5:0 in the game for third place.
It looks like Celtic was faster then Blackburn, as The Rovers have also been interested to sign him.