Sunderland are facing a fight to hold onto their captain and star player this summer
Sunderland’s leadership team have been around football for a long time and so make no mistake, they know this works.
They’ll understand that this situation isn’t all that dissimilar to a year ago. Then, they had the advantage of Premier League finance and the fact that Granit Xhaka had after talks caught the bug and wanted to join their project. Bayer Leverkusen were essentially backed into a corner, eventually sanctioning a sale they never wanted to make.
Here’s the thing, though: Sunderland put their money where their mouth was. They paid what most would have said was a touch over the odds for a 33-year-old midfielder, recognising that he remained an elite operator on and off the pitch with a unique importance to Bayer Leverkusen. It would be a stretch to say in the end the deal worked for all parties, but the German club could at least reflect on a very good fee to soften the blow.
So you suspect that the reaction inside Sunderland when Chelsea’s initial bid of £8 million landed over the weekend closely mirrored that of the fanbase: somewhere between incredulity and anger.
Of course Chelsea have the right to chance their arm to try and get the best deal possible for their club, though it is certainly very helpful to them that Xhaka’s interest in the move has leaked and that Sunderland are now having to deal with the fallout. But now they have to get real.
It’s understood that Sunderland agreed a total package, including add-ons, of around £17 million to sign Xhaka last summer. Since then, he has enjoyed an outstanding campaign and showed no sign either of physical or technical decline. In terms of his book value, Sunderland will have paid down somewhere around £5 million of that fee through amortisation in this year’s accounts. So Chelsea’s current view is that a ‘fair’ valuation of Sunderland’s talismanic leader, still one of the best midfielders in the Premier League, would see the Black Cats record a cash and SCR loss when he still has two years left on his deal and would walk into just about every starting XI on the planet. Cheeky would be one way of putting it; an outright insult would be another.
Chelsea are entitled to take the view that at 34, Xhaka has little resale value and that the other associated costs of a deal mean they cannot pay over the odds. The issue here is that Xabi Alonso has recognised all of the same things that Sunderland did last summer, encouraging them to stump up in a calculated gamble that has paid off handsomely. Alonso has recognised that Xhaka can play an invaluable role in providing leadership to a young squad, in setting the standards he wants day in, day out. And that uniquely, he can do so while still producing top-level performances on the pitch.
While acknowledging that the deals are very different due to age and therefore resale value, consider for a moment that two years ago Chelsea paid £30 million to reunite Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall with Enzo Maresca and that a year previous, they paid Southampton an initial £53 million to recruit Romeo Lavia. Both clubs in this saga will undoubtedly and understandably take very different views on what represents a fair fee for Xhaka, but Sunderland are more than within their rights to send Chelsea packing at this stage.
While determined not to sell, Sunderland will understand that they are in a difficult position and there will likely privately be some realism about what could lie ahead. Signing Xhaka was a transformative moment in their summer transfer window last year, and there will be immense respect and gratitude for how quickly he has helped move the project forward. Two key mantras behind the scenes are that no one is bigger than the club, and another that the project only works if the club demonstrates it will not unreasonably stand in the way of players when opportunities they want to take come along. They will be aware of the optics of a long saga and equally, fully aware of the negative consequences of keeping around a leader who has decided he would rather be elsewhere.
They also have a responsibility to protect the club’s position, and to ensure that any sale leaves director of football Florent Ghisolfi in a good position to head back into the transfer market with the unenviable duty of trying to replace Xhaka. Perhaps their lowball bid suggests Chelsea have had real encouragement that a deal is possible, but it also at this stage raises questions about just how serious they are about making it happen.
Sunderland will be realistic, but they are under no obligation to roll over.
Though it will be a source of deep disappointment for fans, it is perhaps not a great surprise that Xhaka has decided he would like to reunite with the head coach under whom he had the most successful season of his career. He would leave having had an overwhelmingly positive impact at Sunderland, even if the end would be disappointingly soon. Even so, he will surely understand the club’s current position - this was meant to be a multi-year project and if things have changed then sure, that’s football. It’s nevertheless on Chelsea now to make it worthwhile, just as Sunderland did a year ago. At the moment, they have fallen short and by a long distance.
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