I couldn’t quite believe my eyes this morning when I saw that Chelsea had made an enormous profit on Oscar, by offloading him to China for £63m.
To put that into context, that’s a few million less than Luis Suarez was sold to Barcelona for, more than Kevin De Bruyne cost Manchester City and 157 times more expensive than Leicester’s Riyad Mahrez.
Football, eh?
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What’s most irritating about the sale from a Liverpool perspective is that it enables Chelsea the chance to sign James Rodriguez from Real Madrid, simply with the money they sold a fringe player for. That’s our biggest title rival making a significant January purchase while we toil for a Sadio Mane replacement, with the winger absent at the AFCON for most of January.
Then again… Crystal Palace gave us back what we spent on Christian Benteke over a summer which saw us rake in almost £100m in transfer fees, so Chelsea aren’t the only expert deadwood offloaders.
For Jurgen Klopp, he’s not worried about China’s attempted football invasion, as the prestige of Europe’s leagues will always be bigger. What’s more, he suggests that the Premier League, with it’s monstrous TV deals, isn’t far off!
“You know that the rest of Europe thinks the same thing about England!” Klopp replied, when asked whether there was a danger the money in China would skew the playing fields and make all the top players head East.
“If a player decides to go there, usually it’s in another part of your career.
“I think in this moment it’s not a league you want to play, the only way to get players to go there is the money.
“In all the big European leagues you can earn a lot of money, it should be enough.
“It’s not an option for me. Maybe for a holiday but it’s absolutely no option for me.
“I don’t think we should say it’s a danger, it’s another opportunity.”
(Source: Echo)