I think we paid Dynamo Kiev about £11M for him and got about £5m when we loaned/sold him to Besiktas. - so that's still £6M down the pan
Handy money, good to hear. We can perhaps put it towards the next £10m we need to pay Alvarez for some bizarre reason haha!
Nice one, what's the sell on clause there then? No doubt we somehow have to pay the transfer fee!! Most bizarre thing since Milton Nunez that whole episode
Lens was he not suited for the league, not up for the fight, a luxury player we didn't have space for or never given a chance. Can't even remember when he went out on loan was it championship or premier league days? All the ****e times and failed signings have rolled into one
**** me every now and then I see something like this and can’t quite believe the bugger played for us. So many players that didn’t give a crap about this club or doing well for it.
Personally, I thought he did well for us initially. Remember his goal against West Ham? He'd come to work with Advocaat who he knew from his time at AZ and PSV Eindhoven. When Advocaat left, Allardyce didn't fancy him and left him out of the side. That's when Lens lost interest. "I didn't come to the Premier League to sit on the bench" he said. Not the greatest attitude maybe, but to me the lurching from a manager like Advocaat, who would work with players like Lens, to one like Allardyce embodies the lack of direction and planning that we had at the club at the time.
I kind of agree, but to me players like Lens are like Nicklas Bendtner, they're luxuries and can be great assets, but you can't build a team around them and where we were at that time we couldn't rely on them 100%. In Bendtners case I remember talking to some Arsenal fans about him, and their opinion was that he only put himself out when he felt like it and that sometimes it seemed like it was beneath him to try. It's probably why their careers have never hit the levels that their abilites should have taken them. That said we went from a manager who may have indulged Lens to get possibly the best out of him to a manager who at the very least demands that you put a shift in, which does show a lack of planning as you say.
Still the craziest saga in SAFC transfer history IMO. Sign a player on loan with a view to buy. Plays 14 minutes and not seen again. Clause is activated as SAFC stay in the pl. No part of the clause had anything to do with minimum appearances, just SAFC stay up (who the **** negotiated that?) We refuse to sign him due to some apparently legal reason. He remains without a club. Sunderland lose tribunal being forced to pay Inter the transfer fee... Yet don’t get the players registration???? Forced to pay both transfer, and wages, and compensation to the club who got him for free after we didn’t sign him but pad for him... someone tell me, in what business world, anything like that would happen??
