I raise you Coates, Pacheco, N'Gog and Wilson. With Shelvey being the lone 'success'.
Henderson, Clyne, Mascherano and Enrique were all expensive mid table buys. We were at least able to get decent money back on Downing and Carroll (who was clearly a panic buy to replace Torres).
We've paid 15 million for Yesil, Illori and Alberto. They were signed within twelve months of each other. Yesil probably will never play for us because of his injury problems. Alberto started 9 games was deemed not good enough and loaned out. He's on our books but will probably never play for us again. Illori has played one game went off injured and probably doesn't have a future here. We'll be lucky to scrap back 3-5 million for these three. We lost 10-12 million on Downing and well lose a similar amount on those three. How is that better value for money? At least Downing started for us regularly. The others have done nothing despite costing the combined price of a first XI player. Clyne, Skrtel, Moreno, Mignolet, Sturridge and Milner all cost the price of those three( or less) and they're regular starters for us. That proves how these 'young players with potential signings' add up. We also have a low success rate with them especially if they aren't at big clubs like Inter or Chelsea.
Our best signings have been players that weren't good/consistent enough for the big clubs they were at: Can (Bayern sold to Bayer), Sturridge (Chelsea), Coutinho (Inter) and Sakho (PSG). Those are the type of signings we should be trying to replicate.
Sporting's official statement (quoted below) said that the "global value" of the deal for Ilori was €7.5m, and that they would receive 25% of any future profit (i.e. 25% of any profit beyond €7.5m). On the day we signed him (2/9/13) the Euro to pound rate was
1.17, so that means the "global value" was £6.4m.
The term "global value" seems to imply that there was certain add-ons in the deal which is hard to identify exactly, but I'd guess that his actual fee was only around £4m + add-ons up to £6.4m if he reached the targets. Whatever the add-ons were it seems unlikely that he's reached any of them as he's only played once for us competitively. The fact that Villa were happy to include an option of £7m at the end of his loan suggests that his value isn't completely written off either, despite how his loan has gone subsequently.
This is from a newspaper but has a direct quote from the official statement, which can be found in various other articles as well.
http://www.publico.pt/desporto/noticia/liverpool-paga-75-milhoes-ao-sporting-por-tiago-ilori-1604634
“A Sporting Clube de Portugal - Futebol, SAD informa ter chegado a acordo com o Liverpool Football Club para a transferência do jogador Tiago Ilori, num negócio de valor global de €7.500.000,00 (sete milhões e quinhentos mil euros). Mais se informa que esta sociedade manterá na sua titularidade 25% da mais valia numa futura transferência do Tiago Ilori”, diz o comunicado publicado na manhã desta segunda-feira.
As for Yesil, we paid only £1m for him and could at least make that back (or close to it) if he has one decent season anywhere. That was a smart signing given how he was performing for Germany's youth teams and how highly rated he was. Unlucky with injuries really otherwise he could possibly have been a steal. Very low risk, high reward.
Luis Alberto was signed for £5.6m according to
transfermarkt, and given the way he's performing at Deportivo I'd say there's a good chance that the club will get most of that money back. He's contracted until 2018 so his value should still be good.
So, to pick your arguments apart:
- the total outlay was not £15m, but more likely to be around £11m (£1m + £4m + £5.6m).
- we won't be "lucky" to earn £3-5m on these 3 at all. In fact I wouldn't surprise me to see us get that for Luis Alberto alone. Ilori still has decent value left too based on his u21 showing.
- We won't lose £10-12m on these 3 because that would constitute losing them all for free given that we only paid £11m for them. If we take a very pessimistic view we might lose up to £6m, earning £5m for the 3 of them, for example. It's likely that the club can sell them for more than £5m though.
- Your arguments don't "prove" that these signings are pointless at all. If you want to start that argument please feel free to include similar signings like Coutinho £8m, Can £8m, Origi £9.8m, and Gomez £3.5m (among others) that would help provide a holistic view. One could argue that Coutinho or Gomez's successes alone have each more than offset any losses on any others for instance. We even made a profit on Assaidi for instance. Aspas was a cheap backup who we made our money back on - no harm done (well, apart from a dodgy corner
)
Taking this back on topic, signing Grujic for £4.4m is a really good piece of business. Either he becomes a great player for us, or he can be sold to any number of clubs in Europe whereby we recoup most of the fee. Low risk, high reward.
This area of our transfer business is very far from being our problem so I find it surprising that people criticize this policy so often. If you want to criticize the transfer business then criticize the expensive overpriced signings who we sell later for much lower than what we bought them for, because THAT is where the damage is being done, and not with the low risk, high reward Luis Alberto/Ilori/Gomez/Yesil//etc type signings.
Going back to the start of your post, you said that "We were at least able to get decent money back on Downing and Carroll", as if losing £10-12m on Downing and £20m on Carroll was a minor problem, before throwing out false statements about the less damaging signings which have very little downside by comparison. With this in mind I kindly suggest that you get your facts and priorities straight!
