Everton make Almeida enquiry

Send him here, where money is no object.

Phil, no end product sums McGeady up.

Speaking of Irish players, what do people think of the idea of signing Stephen Ireland. I haven't seen it touted anywhere, it's just that I know that Villa are prepared to let him go. A serious gamble but you never know with some players.

We need players who are going to improve us and McGeady doesn't fall into that category.

He has a hell of a lot more skill than SWP.

Like I said, he lacks end product. To be honest, I didn't realise he was 27 - I thought if he was 23-24 then we could get a player with a lot of potential. At 27 he has probably peaked and I agree that he wouldn't get in our starting eleven.

If we are considering giving Baines a 100k contract surely we can afford a proven goalscorer like Villa.

I love the guy but if those are his demands (which they arent) then he'd have to be sold.

Baines will be offered £75k like Fellaini. Villa will want £100k+. Not a chance.

I thought we are offering Baines 65k a week not 100k?

If we offer Baines a 100k contract, that will put Moyes off signing him.

It's plain, simple common sense. If we are to keep him, we need to offer him 100k, it has to be done.

Our offer to Baines is that he is first choice, our set piece taker and a major part of how we play. If Baines wants to chase money then he will leave Everton, it's that simple. £75k is plenty and a limit to a club like us.

With Villa, he will have to take a massive wage cut to play for a team in England who won't be in the CL or probably not challenging for PL title.

We never actually know a single players thoughts, all we can do is speculate

Does Baines come across as money motivated to you? I'm sure he wants to play where he enjoys it and the fans live him. There are many good footballing reasons for him to go to Man U, and many for him to stay put. We can't compete with Man U financially, I'm afraid that is a fact.

I think they is a few players like our very own Jags, who appriciate what they've got and are'nt interested in being a mercenary

Good luck luck to him. You would have to be very warped in your thinking to blame him for the boards inability to attract players that could challenge (realistically) for honours. He should be in a team winning league titles.

You're failing to grasp any of this aren't you.

Would Baines go play for Spartak Moscow for £100k p/w if we offered him £70k? I sincerely doubt he is that sort. If Baines wants to play for Man Utd then he will go there and he will accept probably around £80k and his decision will be based mainly on winning trophies and CL football.

Your argument seem to be that if we want to progress then we have to pay players more than we can afford. If we give the lad £100k then do you think it will stop at Baines? No, of course Fellaini and the club captain will want improved terms.

I want him to stay, desperately, but if he doesn't fancy £75k with us then he can either see out his contract or leave for a good fee and we find a young replacement.

I haven't got a problem with anyone being sold, as long as that money is reinvested in the team. Baines in particular is possibly the best player in the world in his position – I don't say that lightly. If he wanted to go to Man U, for example, I wouldn't begrudge him after he has given us several years excellent service. But the price would have to be right – £25 million for starters. I wouldn't be too bothered if Fellaini went for £23 million either. But the money would have to be spent on 5 or 6 excellent players to re-shape the team.

The key to our long term future – in the absence of a strategy from the board – is to trade in your assets at the right time and consistently reinvesting in younger talent that will improve and go up in value. Keep the wage bill under control as well, and we might be able to see off the sabotage inflicted by Kenwright, Elstone and Co!

A couple of years ago Jags was interviewed whilst on England duty and arsecole was being juvenile from the balcony above. The look Jags gave him summed it up. I think they both prefer to be in a wankerfree zone.

For that reason I think our Victorian gentleman time traveller is staying put. I also don't think anyone will come in for the 'fro either as whilst good enough for us, he's just not going to fit at the top 4.

I could earn more money in another job but where I am suits my family and life balance. It isn't all about cash, especially when you've got more coming in than you've got going out ( to subvert the advert) like our friend, Leighton the extra from Zulu

Personally, I wouldn't give anyone £65k a week, no matter who they are. We are not a rich club but, as Mr Rathbone continually preaches, it is possible to build a top side out of players on realistic wages.

Robert Lewandowski, the brilliant Dortmund No 9 is on £30k a week. The world is full of decent players on even less. Our scouts have to find them. The mercenaries in our squad are beginning to irritate me.

It seems to me that on my meagre salary, and I mean fucking meagre, I get along okay. I didn't get to see Everton last season for financial reasons but I might this year. So, ... getting to see Everton will be a nice luxury. Now, somehow, I can get FIFTY times my annual salary, not to help me watch Everton, but to fucking actually play for them. To BE PAID TO RUN OUT TO Z CARS.!!

Robin, personal development and experiencing foreign culture would be high on my list if I were a trainee management consultant, marketing, outsourcing, HR team building broker. We're talking about playing for Everton. Now who wouldn't take that?

I'm very passionate about the firm I work for and would leave the industry before I'd would work for 90% of the competition, no matter the money, but there are exceptions.

I'm sure a player will be happy to accept lower wages than what are on offer if he is playing at the level he wants to, his family are settled, he fits in with the club, maybe even is a fan etc but if all these things are equal and someone offers him a better deal, and probably better lifestyle etc then why not move?

No one calls players mercenaries when a new manager comes and they are shipped out to the highest bidder, it rubs both ways. You can't ask people to be loyal if they don't get loyalty back.

Sounds reasonable enough.

We offer to make him top/joint top paid player, and then he either wantsa us or not.

The type of man he is and his evident love of the club means we have a chance. If he thinks however we ain't ever gonna make CL, thn he'll probably be off. And if it's all about money, we will never match Man U, no matter what. Simples!

I expect us to lose one of Baines/Felli, but if we lose both, we're gonna struggle. Lose one and replace him with a £10 million player, and bring in a proper striker, we'll compete again. Keep both and get a good striker, and it's (chaleenging for 4th) all down to whether Martinez was a mistake or not.

Enough money is enough money. You can only drive one car at a time, live in one house at a time, and as long as your family are safe and happy and healthy you probably wouldn't move for money, but you might move for the chance of winning a trophy or two. I imagine that would be the only reason Baines would go.

To shatter your illusion that everyone is driven by money - especially in the football world - can I just say one person's name? Mikel Arteta. He was on £75k per week with us and left to Arsenal for £65k per week.

It is well known that Baines is a similarly decent, honest and very down to earth bloke so I have no doubt in my mind that going up to an offensive £100k per week, thus using another two good players' salaries in the increase alone in an attempt to keep him with us would be utterly preposterous.

Case closed!

When our precious little Bainesy gets a sniff of CL football with Man Utd, and £100k a week in his pocket, he will take it and run.

Deal with it.

Your arrogance is staggering. You think you can speak for everyone connected with football? Don't judge people who you don't know by your own yard stick. Maybe YOU are driven by money but I'm sure there are other decent people in every walk of life, including football, who place happiness, contentment and peace of mind over money.
Deal with it.

I ask you, who was the last player to be linked with us in the media and then turn up at the club? By linked I mean not report it a week before they sign. The one thing that this club has got right over the past 10 years is that no-one knows who we are signing until they are ready to go to Finch Farm.

Nobody has come in for Baines (yet), let alone offered him £100k per week and whether he wants to stay or not would probably be irrelevant if the price was right for the board anyway.

Offering him £100k per week to stay right now is just lunacy of the highest order and the type that has got us into this mess in the first place. You haven't been advising the board on business practises this last decade plus by any chance have you?

This is ALL they do.

Someone like Wayne Rooney goes swinging his massive one all over town whereas Bainsey has a tiny little tager of a wage slip that he has to hide away from his peers when he goes on international duty.

The question is, does size matter to Bainesy?

I like how you've slipped in 'Champions League Football' with your £100k p/w.

Everybody else has argued that if Baines did leave for Man Utd it will be to further his career with trophies and Champions League football. Everybody accepts that.

You argued that footballers were solely motivated by money - despite numerous examples to the contrary.

So, just to shut you up:

Man Utd offer Baines £80k
Everton offer him £75k
Spartak Moscow offer him £120k

Where does Baines go?

I guarantee it's not Moscow.

Whilst I don't for one minute think Baines can be categorised with the Ashley Coles and the like he his human and as a professional sportsman probably keen to improve his lot whether that be medals or pounds who knows.

In saying that, I still don't think he will leave, but then I never thought Moyes would actually get the Utd job.

"I have never seen so many people trying to defend the moral values of professional footballers."
Andrew, you are in danger of joining Ross in lumping everyone from a particular section of society into the same boat. Whilst I wouldn't dream of attempting to defend the likes of Ashley Cole, John Terry or DJ thumping Gerrard , I think that there are countless basically decent, although arguably thick, players (if we're going to stereotype players let's do it properly). Not everyone is a money grabbing mercenary. I wasn't.

Then again, I was crap.

It's just that you don't see many people defend footballers for a subject like money in this day and age, just pointing out the irony. As I have stated earlier in the thread and in previous I think Leighton Baines is happy with his lot at Everton and could well finish his career at the club.

Although I do think it's tough to compare players in this situation to Giggs, Scholes and Neville who sort of started at the top and of course Baines has jumped ship once before when a better opportunity came calling.

However a couple of years ago, I was having a pint with a mate and he was talking about his son who is now around 14 and has, since he was about 9, been involved at kid level with City, Blackburn, Everton and Liverpool.

(the lad is a decent little player but at that age, who the fuck knows)

Anyway, my mate's insight was interesting because it made me think why so many players appear to be these dead-eyed, seemingly unthinking, me-me-me types.

And here's the/a reason.

Basically, once these kids become involved with a club, all they see is venal dog-eat-dog, step-on-someone-to-get-what-you-want, horrible bastards behaving horribly.

My mate described the kid's 'trainers' at all these club's as follows.

"Honest, they're all fucking bastards, they don't give two fucks about the kids y'know" adding "if they get one kid out of it, they're made up and just fuck the rest off, they don't give a shite if the kids are crying or any of that"

(I know, he's not as 'flowery' as I am).

It did make me think though that maybe a lot of our players are the way they are (greedy, thick, out of touch, overrated, overpaid etc) because, that's all they've ever seen.

Monkey see monkey do type..stuff.

Risdale, 2001

Well all I can tell you, as someone educated by Jesuits, is it's a neat little saying but had absolutely no effect on me and/or most of those I went to school with.

In me they had a catholic, they wanted to make a better catholic, but being wild-eyed sadists, they simply ended up producing a confirmed atheist.

I'm not disputing our parents have an influence, of course they do, but I personally think their input is overrated (often BY parents) and believe our biggest influence, certainly between 10 and 25 is whoever the coolest 'kids' are, or whoever can (apologies to Yewtree victims) dangle the biggest and most attractive carrot.

Oh, and the small matter of his laughable notion that we should simply pay Baines £100k a week as money is merely a figment of our collective imagination so why aren't we more free with it? That point well addressed by Mark Stone (082)

As you rightly (albeit dramatically) say though, and as was said earlier in this thread, nobody is offering Baines that money so far as we know, which makes this is all hypothetical and long may it stay that way.

Come to think of it, there might be a pattern emerging, something I've never noticed about myself before.

The Cubs, Jesuits, Everton, country music - it's all about suffering.

It's like Ray Winston says to Mick Ford in Scum - "You muss faaaackin' laav it!"

Oo-er, maybe I do!

It was, indeed, Frankie Xavier wot said that
The SJs have a lot to answer for, if me and thee are typical products of their "educational ethos"
Feckers the lot of them: "Torquemada was a wimp"

Offer baines 100k to prevent him going to Utd? Really?

Its not so much the idiocy of thinking we should pay a player more than we can afford. But you combine that with the complete lack of logic that assumes that we can out-bid Utd for a player they might want.

That requires some seriously powerful drugs.

If our academy churns out 100 championship level players but no-one of the quality to get into our first team, it's failed miserably. Success is measured by how many players we can either use in the first team, or sell on for cash.

If kids are left in tears or discarded by the academy because they're not good enough then welcome to the real world.

That said, I'd wager that many kids are rejected when they absolutely do have the talent, but perhaps don't have the physical or other attributes deemed as necessary by the coaches.....and that would all be very good, except that I reckon that our coaching and academies probably focus on the wrong set of qualities. Places like La Masia or De Toekomst at Ajax probably look for different attributes than our own.

P.S. I hope we get that Redmond kid. He looked really good playing for the U21's last week

Why do we suspect so many top players sign for Chelsea and Man City? Its not because they have a great history for being a famous club who dominates the English top flight or Europe.

Billionaire owners have recently bought PSG and Monaco. PSG are now dominating french football and got to the last 8 of the CL. Monaco will soon be involved in a 2 horse race for the French domestic title.

Its a sad fact of modern day football, the teams with the biggest wage bill, will always be the most successful sides

Secondly, we're not talking about Royal Marines, we're talking about children and I don't believe that in the 'real world' (outside of football and Dickens' London) children between 9 and 14 are (generally) used/abused this way.

However, if you are right (and you might be, I'm just giving my opinion and passing on what someone with first-hand experience told me) it isn't really the point I was making.

The point was the behaviour towards the kids (acceptable or not) If accurate, WOULD help explain why wide-eyed 9 year old boys become dead-eyed, self-centered, self-serving, greedy (etc etc) 25 year-olds.

I actually think your last paragraph is spot-on, particularly focusing on the wrong qualities in our coaching compared to the work done in other countries.

And there is actually proof (of a sort) to back this up.

To know that 'foreign' coaching makes more sense, you only have to look at results at the opposite end of the scale - full international teams.

We're shite, loads of them are better.

So in your point to shut me up, the reason that Russia, particularly Anzhi and Zenit is attractive for top players is simple. They get offered a lot of cash. So, you mentioned Spartak as an example, if they offered Baines that amount you cited, £120k, Europe every year he would seriously consider it.

Do you think that Eto'o, Hulk and Witsel went to Russia for footballing reasons? Of course not.

By the way Ray it isn't arrogance. Good night everyone.

Would Moyes spunk half his transfer kitty on a left back, when he needs centre mids?

Our wage bill is 60 odd million. We Can only name a 25 squad for prem lque. I would give Bains and Fellaini £90 a week each, beg them to stay and promise to bring a striker a winger in on same money.....that's £20m in wages a year on 4 top players.

Jags will earn good money Hieghtinga will be gone, and the rest will be on £40k or less. The likes of Barkley will be on less than 20

Therefore we've kept the wage bill below th £65m mark and done everything possible to keep our 2 best players and bring 2 good ones in

If they decide to leave well, then it's up to them, not our fault.

My fear is arsenal. They need a left back and they need a new viera. Worse still they should be our target(4th). If we are not seriously challenging for fourth, then what is the point if going the game. It's the next step we need to take.

Taking many pts into account(money, trophy chances, Europe, leaque, location) the player WILL and should do what's best for himself and fambo.

We just need to remind them how important they are to us and make them feel wanted.

However, this can be overcome by other factors, such as playing champ lque, getting more recognition, being at a club you love, or you and fambo is settled in area. Plus loads of other factors. As long as your still getting paid well

Everyone's different, some will sit on bench for big pay others won't. But no one takes big pay cuts.

The pay has to be good, in fact brilliant, then all other things get weighed up too.

Thought that was obvious. IMHO you are both correct to a degree

Arteta for eg took what? A drop from 75k to 65-70? But got champs lqu footy and the chance to play in front of 60,000 every week, hoping the international manager may notice him more. Also how much extra sponsorship will he earn at arsenal?

It was definitely a footballing decision but one that did cost much. If we offered 120k plus the captaincy would that have changed his mind?

Bains will go to Man U if its offered. He has to for footballing reasons. But if they offer him 70 and we offer him 100 made him skipper, reminded him about Pienaars move and martinez told him we are going to get fourth this year, he could be persuaded otherwise.

Man U don't want him anyway

I'd also like David Villa in our team. And Isco and Cavani too. But we are dealing in reality...there is no way Villa would move to a team outside of the Champions League, and we could not fund his wages. I expect Barca will keep him for striking backup, unless they get a top offer from the one of the big clubs. But, he still has another season or two at the top of the game imo.

And with respect to Arsenal Alan...I don't want to be pessimistic, but I think they will improve, for the first time in some time, this summer. I think the board needed to support our chances for top four at Xmas...and we've missed the boat now. Arsenal's form in the last six months was not far off title winners...and if Higuain comes in, as expected, as I see it, the only real weak spots are at right back, and in goal for them. They've also the best financial model in this league, and will beable to fund title assaults soon enough imo. Chelski under Mourinho also look far more likely to challenge for the title, than miss out on top four. Unfortunately, I think we will be fighting for 5th to 7th again, with our far more wealthy neighbours and Gareth Bale.