Steve Earle

Then we won’t sell.

🤔 Can’t compare best and second best player challenge? I think you can! I’m not arguing that we’d get £50m for Kels, but equally I can’t think why we’d think of selling for less than £20m.

Should this thread be re-named ‘hands up if you’re one of the lucky dozen or so who can access Twitter’?

Why on Earth not? He’s a proven PL goalscorer. We got £40-50m for Maddison in the same circumstances.

Thought he’d go for £25m if he went, & hoped he’d be the one we kept. Gutted if true.

£8m ???!!!!??? Just don’t Leicester. Don’t.

Alex Smithies!!!

Who didn't love Peter Eastoe? Twice.

Or formerly?

Bit late for switching to Rugby Union?

Antony Gordon is the comparator. We surely wouldn’t sell for any less than £45m? I’ve no problem selling him. His utter uselessness when we’re out of possession frustrates the hell out of me! #DrainTheSwamp

I think we can assume that add-ons, when paid, would be subject to Norwich’s sell-on clause. Otherwise there’d be a whole raft of eg £1m transfers with ‘up to £49m in add-ons’!

With the Maddison thread closed I wasn’t sure where to put this but good to read in Rob Tanner’s piece in The Athletic that the fee for Maddison could comfortably exceed £50m with the add-ons. I was confident throughout we wouldn’t sell him for just £40m

oh, and Nish!

I go back a bit further and would probably choose Banks over Kasper but that's a marginal call. With you on peak Ricky, Kante, Mahrez and Vardy. Maddison would vie with McAllister for a no.10 role for me, if we went with a modern 4231 formation. In a 442 he wouldn't be close to the team, which would have Kante and a 6/8, such as Izzet, Drinky, Tielemans, Draper, Sammels. The other certainty for me would be Weller.

I concur!

Interesting exercise. I wonder who you'd rate ahead of him among the AM's we've had over the years? I don't happen to think he's an all time great, but he's in the conversation for a place in the 'all time XI' and surely would make a match day all time squad?

Think we can assume from the Percy article that there's the potential for this to reach £50M but probably no more unless Spurs win a big one. However gloomy we are over £40M, I suspect we'd all accept that somewhere between £45M and £50M is about right in the circs?

One of the reasons for the low initial fee - if true - might be to keep the payment to Norwich down. And it might also see us paying less for Winks than we might otherwise have done…

Or ‘Shock and’. Reminds me of the IT consultant we had at work some while ago. Vietnamese with an unpronounceable surname spelt ‘Ngo’. Everyone called him ‘Wash’!

No 'maybe' about it!

Well they're not mutually exclusive either! I agree Evans was the better of the two in Harry's second season. Maguire did ok without Jonny in his first. Evans had the happy knack of making all his CB partners look better. Pure quality, when fit. As good as I've ever seen in fact.

If there were any truth in the central premise - he wants out - surely he'd either be heading to the club he part owns in the USA, or to riches beyond Rebekah's wildest dreams in the Saudi Pro-league?

They’re not mutually exclusive! He was terrific for us.