The main damage wasn’t on our cap, it’s how we looked in the media. It made our club look weak and unprofessional. Something the club has been striving to get away from for years. It also doesn’t help it’s the club captain.
It's more the tone it sets for the other players and how they too are encouraged to drag it out until we are forced to add that little bit extra on or they walk. Add an extra $30-50k on to each new re-signing that you may not have had to pay and it all adds up. Or it may even encourage you to go and have a public sit down with your rival at their leagues club and see what shakes from that.
Captains set the tone at clubs or at least should. So when our merkin captain allowed his negotiations to be played out in the press yet again, it sent the signal to all that you do whatever it takes to get the best deal for yourself. I mean who is going to pull you in line, the captain?
The point is that if the captain is ultra professional during negotiations, then it sends a positive signal to the whole squad. If he were to say publicly what Moses did and suggest that he will be signing with the club again and that it is just a matter of ironing out the details through his manager, but loves the club and doesn't want to go anywhere else and can't see himself playing for anyone else and loves this club to death, well it is a message that can only encourage the rest of the squad to do similar too. I mean does anyone really believe that he was going to get an offer from any other strong club that was going to be greater then ours? We were already paying him the absolute top end of what he is worth. It was always going to be us. He knew this and so did his manager. They just had to do all the haggling in private like professionals, not use the media to get the very last penny out of us and leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth doing it.
I believe if the right tone was set in the first place then the rest of the players would have been behaved accordingly. Then even if they were to sign with another club it still means a hell of a lot more to the fans and optics then what we went through this time around. At least then if players were to sign with another club, we would all have the impression that they really did want to stay, but the offers they received were just to great and rich for them to refuse. But when you just hold out for the highest offer and or play it out in the media, then you just look like a mercenary and someone that couldn't give a toss about our club. Which is how some of these players are perceived now including our captain. There is a right way to negotiate and a wrong way. Our captain has chosen the wrong way two times now. Hopefully we won't need him for a third.
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