For years City have been a dreadful selling club, even pre-ADUG we would overspend on players and offer them long term deals only to move them on at a fraction of their cost for a huge loss. Players like Danny Mills sucked us dry by sitting on fat 5 year contracts doing nothing and when we were in a more financially precarious state these deals never helped us.
Now that money is not an issue there could be a tendency for our sales policy to get even worse, but that would be massively detrimental, not just with regards to the financial fair play rules, but also just because it confirms some of the negativity attitudes held towards us.
Right now is a fine time for us to start to change that, and the case of Jerome Boateng is one where we have to be careful. If you believe media speculation, Bayern Munich have offered £6million for a player that we signed for £10million. Now clearly selling at that price would be an awful piece of business, but a few years ago I think we would do just that. There seemed to be an attitude of bringing money back into the club no matter what. Clearly figures involved weren't this high, but the policy was still thus.
In a world where Phil Jones is worth £20million, Jerome Boateng, whilst not having had the best season is clearly worth more than the paltry £6million on offer. The club seem to be playing hard ball and so they should, we aren't dealing with a small club short of money, we are dealing with one of the biggest and richest clubs in Europe we should make them pay close to OUR estimation, not what they see fit.
When we are buying, we always pay close to what selling clubs want, where as when we sell we seem to cave in far too easily. So far I like that we are standing firm, and maybe we won't ever get an offer of £16million, but I don't think £13million is out of the question and that would represent good profit. We have to learn from our mistakes and there is no better time than the present.
Clearly this standpoint can't go for all players, some of them, Bridge and Jo for example just need to be moved on no matter what, and securing £6million for both of them combined would be nice. With useful players like Boateng and Adebayor however we have to stand firm and make sure we get offers that actually represent the players value to us.
It is fine charging fans more for season tickets to help meet the fair play guidelines (within reason), but we also have to do better financially in terms of player sales. Just because the German wants to leave and is doing everything he can to secure the transfer, it doesn't mean we have to back down and give in to his rather desperate demands.
The case for Adebayor is slightly different, we may find it harder to find a buyer due to the players seemingly inflexible wage demands, but again there is cause for concern, we shouldn't be tempted to just give him away for nothing to remove his huge salary from our wage bill, we must tread carefully.
Look at all the games that Udinese are playing with us over Sanchez, this isn't the time to appear small time and let players leave for nothing, it's time we finally got things right!
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