ENIC

[MartyFunkhouser]

Not sure if Bale would have stayed into the second season but i think AVB’s ideal football would have been established at the club with Moutinho, and he wouldn’t have had to make do with the players he had. It was to his credit that he delivered us our record PL points total at the time and got the best out of Bale.

But looking back I think not signing Moutinho was classic Levy and exactly what the club is looking to rectify now. The idea that a player might be more valuable to us because of the system we are trying to create. That we haggled until the last minute and had to post something on our website explaining why we didn’t get him was completely ridiculous. We had a figure in mind based on what we considered a good deal, and didn’t factor how much more likely we would have been to have been successful on the pitch with the signing the manager wanted to make everything tick.

Similar to Jol losing Carrick and getting Zokora as a replacement. I know the argument will be that a good manager can make it work with good players and Jol did ok in that season after Carrick thanks to Berbatov, but my GHod it was frustrating to live so many seasons missing out on key players for relatively minor amounts that could have been difference makers and then seeing those managers get sacked for not delivering results.

I will always thank Levy for the stadium. And if anyone wants to argue that we needed to operate exactly in that way to be sure we could build the stadium (eg not compromising to get key deals over the line) I’d be willing to hear the argument. The retort would be that we’d be more successful and earn more money with those key players - and GHod knows we’ve probably paid enough off to sack coaches and in letting players contracts run down that over rides any savings we supposedly made on not doing these deals.

The Moutinho deal was nothing to do with Levy fcuking up.

He had a 3rd party ownership issues, the whole deal was agreed until Porto came back at the last minute to change the deal structure and demand a higher fee for the buying out of the third party portion of the deal. The paperwork from Porto then had irregularities that had to be sorted at the last minute which couldn't be sorted. So basically Porto fcuked us, which was confirmed by AVB at the time