John Barnes' Granny wrote:Biscan: £5.5million allegedly "rising to £7million", depends on who you are listening to.
Cheyrou: £3.75million
Diao: £5.5million
Diouff: £10million
Its always hard to be 100% accurate with transfer fees and as Leeds have proved, the cost of signing players can often be substantially higher than the transfer fee published to the media as there can be loads of hidden costs. The above amounts are the generally accepted figures for the transfers of the following players.
Thats £24.75million, plus between £4million to £6million a year in wages.
Selling those players now would bring at the very best £3million-£4million in the transfer market.
£25million.
Look at it this way.
In Houllier's time, we could have got Damien Duff for £12.5million. I know there's no such as a sure thing, but I think most people would agree that disasterous injury aside, Duff would have made a serious impact at whatever club he was at.
The remaining £12.5million would have brought you Anelka, or alternatively Wayne Bridge and Joe Cole.
Ok, its very easy for me to say that with hindsight and perhaps Duff, Cole and Bridge might have flopped very badly at Liverpool. On average, every 4th or 5th signing a club makes just doesn't work out. But there lies the problem: it seems to me that more than half of the players signed by the club in the past 15 years just simply haven't worked out, often to alarming degrees.
That makes for depressing reading.
Don't pull your punches though JBG, talking of hindsight being a great thing etc. At the end of the 2001-2 season when Houllier signed those wasters, we'd come second in the league to Arsenal and it was clear then what we needed: a left back, a left and a right-sided midfielder.
Regardless of their unproven quality, Cheyrou, Diao and Diouf weren't even the right type of players. Add on top of that the fact that they were long shots, untested. Then add on top the fact they cost around18million.
Madness.
We'd be lucky to get 2.5m for Diouf, not least cos Rafa's already announced publicly that he's no longer a part of Rafa's Liverpool. The way we do business still leaves a lot to be desired.
