The sale of Sandro Tonali to Newcastle United was certainly met with opposition, but AC Milan have now tripled their transfer budget as per a report.
According the The Athletic – who published a long and detailed background on exactly how Newcastle landed Tonali – the Premier League side were a bit surprised when their enquiries suggested the player had a genuine enthusiasm about moving there.
They recall how Tonali’s sale was viewed in a certain way by the Italian media, who pitted it as a battle of ‘heart vs. algorithms’. However, no algorithm could know that ‘Tonali’s loyalty to Milan would melt in the face of Newcastle’s offer’.
The 23-year-old was ‘every bit as pragmatic as the club in seeing this opportunity for what it is’ as per the source. The Rossoneri are getting a record fee for an Italian player, but they have also ‘tripled their transfer budget’.
CEO Giorgio Furlani was the chief negotiator of the deal and chief scout Geoffrey Moncada had a say too. The duo helped build Milan’s last Scudetto-winning team, a title that came about after a summer in which Gianluigi Donnarumma walked away for free and was replaced by Mike Maignan.
Therefore, there could be an argument that Milan fans should ‘trust the process’ at least until they, like the rest of the clubs in Serie A’ are able to build ‘revenue-boosting stadiums’ and ‘negotiates bigger and better television deals’.
Selling players for high sums and then spreading the money around on various upgrades of the team is ‘the only way clubs like Milan can get better, unless a sovereign wealth fund were to one day come in and buy them’.
Before people bite at the headline, remember that transfer budget isn’t the amount of money to spend on transfer fees, it’s the amount that can be contributed to a player’s annual purchase cost plus their salary in a year.
So the club’s books immediately have around €50-55m plus Tonali’s salary for the next season (which was full tax rate, not the reduced rate for non-Italian players, so it’s €4-5m).
But when we buy say Loftus-Cheek for 20m on a 4 year contract and €5m a year (gross) salary, that’s €5m per year salary plus €5m per year on his transfer value, so he’s worth ~€10m per year to the budget.
So not as simple as “We had €30m, now we have €90m” (although arguably worse, because we will have to pay the three or four players that are brought in as replacements and RLC is already on the same wage as Tonali or Bakayoko were).
Whut?
All tonali will get us is RLC and Musah which IMO is getting 2 average to bad players for 1 good one..
So without the sale of Tonali we would have 25 m transfer budget?
How? Scaroni said we had great economic yr why 25 m ?
Because they can’t guarantee getting to a UCL semi-final each year?
Because the plan is increasing the wage budget more than paying large transfer fees?
This club is gradually becoming a joke
Selling one of most talented Italian midfielders who was on 2.5 millions per season just to pay 21 millions and give 4 millions a season to an injury prone bench player. No, I don’t look forward to this mercato.
So I agree with you that it’s a bad sale, but quick correction that the cost to the club for Tonali and RLC is very similar in salary terms – RLC benefits from the tax breaks for moving to Italy.