Sannheten rundt Gradel-salget. Her synes jeg klubben gjør det riktige faktisk. Gradel VIL til Frankrike, og da er det galt å holde han igjen.
"Ben Fry: We’re sat here the day after the transfer window has closed. We’ll start with Max Gradel. We talked last week when you said you were keen to keep the player, did his transfer request change the situation?
Ken Bates: Well I think, so there’s no possible misunderstanding from the fans let’s hear the full story. We never wanted Max to go and in fact towards the end of last season we started talking to him about an extended contract. His agent came to see me and he’s a nice guy is Max’s agent. He came to see Shaun and said look, this is the situation, Max has got a chance to play in European Champions League or Europa League football and obviously that’s too grand an attraction for him not to want to go and therefore it would be such an improvement for him because Max is French speaking and of course he comes from the Ivory Coast that we would not stand in his way. He loves Leeds but he wants to the change. And we thought that was pretty logical, we can stand in the way of a player improving himself and obviously we’re not in a position to offer him European football for a few seasons yet so we said yes, no problem. Then, from Max’s point of view, it started going wrong because all the clubs that were supposed to be coming in for him didn’t and then we got enquiries from him from English clubs. West Ham offered us a silly £1.5million for him but over three years. Well, you know, that would mean we wouldn’t have the player and we wouldn’t have the money so why should we sell him to West Ham, a competitor of ours anyway? So, we turned it down and then what’s their name… Sochaux came on to us and offered us, I think €800,000 or something so we told them to shove it. That was the end of that and they came back with an offer of €1.8million with €500,000 add-ons and we told them to shove that as well because at that stage we wanted to keep Max. But that brought a matter to a head when Max, first of all. put in his transfer request and then we told him what the possible options were and he said “I don’t want to stay in England, I want to go to France.†So Nice came in for him but didn’t offer… and finally St Etienne did and it’s so complicated because Max was playing for Ivory Coast in Rwanda which is somewhere in the centre of Africa. He was actually in Amsterdam on the closing day of the transfer deadline so he had to get to there and have a medical and sign before he went out. So we had to let him go. We didn’t want him to go. It’s not a particularly good deal for us because, well to be fair we bought him for £100,000 from Leicester but they have got a 17.5% sell-on so the fee we get, they’ll get 17.5% and there’s a 5% levy which goes to the league so by the time we’ve finished it won’t be that much but we’ve got a substantial sum of about £1.75million net over a year and that goes in Simon’s pot. So the full story is, we wanted Max to sign a new contract, he had decided via his agent that he wanted to go to Europe and even when he had the opportunity of playing in the Premiership he still wanted to go to Europe. I think he’s probably happier there in his French ambiance. So he’s gone. We wish him well. I hope he hasn’t made a mistake. We’ll follow his career in future with interest but meanwhile life goes on."
auren
