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Sky Sports pundit says club can ‘forget about’ getting £100m for reported Liverpool target
Sky Sports pundit Paul Merson has claimed that Borussia Dortmund “can forget” about getting £100million or more for reported Liverpool target Jadon Sancho ().
The claimed in February that the Reds had informed the Bundesliga club of their desire to sign the 20-year-old this summer.
Numerous other elite clubs have also been linked with Sancho, including Manchester United, Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea ().
It’s little surprise that Sancho is so in demand, given his impressive stats so far – in 90 competitive Dortmund games, he has registered .
Over the years, elite players have been sold for upwards of £100million, and is one of several outlets to have reported that Sancho has a £120million price tag.
However, in wake of the global health crisis which has brought the vast majority of football worldwide to a shuddering halt, Merson believes that things are going to be very different on the other side.
“The people who own football clubs, they’re bright, intelligent people,” Merson wrote in the . “They are weighing this up now. Who wants to be paying out that kind of money? And Borussia Dortmund can forget about Chelsea or Manchester United paying £100m for Jadon Sancho.
“Those days are gone. Clubs will be more careful now. Transfer fees are going to come down. Clubs will stop offering big wages and long-term contracts of five or six years. Some of them won’t even be able to shift the players they don’t want any more.
“When the next TV deal comes up surely these clubs are not going to expect Sky and BT to pay big money again? There’s no football on. They won’t risk that happening again. Before all this started I would have said in a couple of years you would see loads of players on £500,000 or £600,000 a week. Not any more.”
TBR View:
Paul Merson is a pundit whose comments sometimes divide opinion but he’s bang on the money here.
The majority of money in football comes from broadcasters who offer huge sums to leagues for the right to show games live, but they will have been stung massively by the football shutdown.
Previously, football was one of the most highly sought after forms of live entertainment and broadcasters were prepared to pay huge sums of money – but at the end of this, there may be more reluctance going forward.
And if the broadcasters were to put forward less money, that will have a knock-on effect on the overall finances within the entire football industry – thus scaling down salaries and transfer fees.