The fact we low balled on him doesn't mean the top price we were willing to pay for him (which we went to eventually) wasn't set by Rodgers and the committee, it was clearly a tactic the money men were using to try and get him for a better price.
Exactly the point I'm making. When a manager wants a player, you get that player for the manager. There's obviously an upper limit to what you'll pay, of course, but you certainly don't jeopardise negotiations by trying to play a transfer like a stock trade or something like that. Business people will always seek best-price. But you don't build teams on "best-price". Sometimes you have to pay a little over the odds for the quality you need, even if it goes slightly over your model. So far, Rodgers has been let down with Dempsey, lost out on Willian, Sigurdsson, Lamela and Salah, and we couldn't close the deal on Konoplyanka. So for his "big ticket" signings, we have mostly failed. These are the signings where, if the manager says "I really need this player", then you should push the boat out to get the player. Failure to do so once, maybe twice, is irritating to a manager. Failure to do so consistently, over a period of time, leads to dissatisfaction. To bring this back to the original discussion of Rodgers (rather than digress into a transfer thread), my feeling is that when the contract negotiations happen (assuming they do), then Rodgers will be less concerned about getting more money for himself, and more concerned with getting more say in the transfers. He wants to fulfil his own vision, his own way - that's why he didn't want a DOF, and that's why he probably has some reservations about how we do our transfer business.
