The Transfer Thread (Rumours and Confirmed)

Well if they sold Ronaldo now they'd probably get just as much for him, that tells you he was underpriced.

 

But the fact that the market massively inflated soon after they bought him tells you he was underpriced.

They'll probably recoup a lot of the Bale money if they were to sell in three years and they make more from marketing than anyone else because they get half of each player's image rights. Buying all of the world's most exciting players for ridiculous prices has been a huge success from a financial perspective so they won't really be worried too much about overpaying. These transfers don't quite pay for themselves but honestly they're really not far off. If anyone cares here's a really long article summarising how.

The problem for Madrid is that from a footballing perspective they've done much worse than they would have wanted for the past ten, fifteen years. So the more important question is whether Bale will change that. I probably rate him higher than anyone here and I'm still not too sure that he will. I don't think individual players are as important as they seem. It's not like on Fifa where you find out how good a team is by adding up how good all their players are. They already had miles better players than Dortmund last season and still went out to them, what difference will having even better players make? They need to find a system that gets the best out of their players and since Mourinho didn't quite manage it I can't see a much worse manager pulling it off.

Cliffs: Bale not as bad a signing as he seems from a financial perspective, not as good a signing as he seems from a football perspective.