Why Wanderers must not let Rob Holding go on the cheap like Chelsea star Gary Cahill

WITH memories of Gary Cahill’s cut-price move to Chelsea still burned into their memory banks, Wanderers fans are desperate for their club to show some better business sense as they deal with Rob Holding’s potential exit this summer.

Four-and-a-half years on, the £7million transfer which took future England captain Cahill to Stamford Bridge still looks the bargain of the century.

No Bolton fan begrudged the rock-solid centre-back the chance to fulfil his potential but the slender profit margin still sticks in the craw of many who watched him mature quickly into the country’s leading central defender.

If Wanderers get their way, a similar figure would be commanded for Holding, a young man with considerably less experience but similar scope for potential.

He has just 30 senior appearances under his belt but managed to attract the admiring glances of Arsenal, Celtic, Everton, Bournemouth and many others in an outstanding breakthrough season, plus force his way into Gareth Southgate’s thinking for this summer’s Toulon Under-21 tournament.

Like Cahill, Holding’s stock is high. And thanks to some canny thinking on the club’s behalf a 12-month option was taken up on his contract just in time to give them some security, if not as much as supporters would like.

Cahill was going out of contract back in January 2012 and so frustratingly it became a case of ‘get what you can’ but just six months earlier the likes of Tottenham and Manchester City were throwing around figures between £12-17m, with the additional lure of players on loan.

Wanderers’ business in the transfer market during the latter years of their Premier League stay hardly bears examination but when it emerged that a portion of the £2million profit they got on Cahill’s move was then paid out to his former club Aston Villa, even more salt was rubbed into the wound.

For some reason they had failed to do business when Arsene Wenger, Harry Redknapp and Roberto Mancini were forming an orderly queue, leaving Chelsea to make a timely swoop in the winter window.

For a couple of years, Whites fans existed on the rumour Chelsea had promised to loan out a player of Bolton’s choosing. But that story came and went with Coyle, and his successor Dougie Freedman knew nothing of the arrangement.

A clause was inserted into the Yorkshireman’s contract in the event of him winning the Champions League, which occurred later that same season, but the money was swallowed up amidst the £50.7m losses in the financial accounts posted on New Year’s Eve, 2013.

Now Wanderers have a wanted man in Holding and a queue of clubs boosted by even higher Premier League TV money, the importance of getting the right deal at this juncture in the club’s history cannot be underestimated.

For starters, any money the Whites get for an academy graduate who has been with the club since the age of eight would be added to the profit pile.

This season in League One there are tight controls on what the club can spend on wages compared to their turnover and so outgoing transfers are even more important than ever.

The Football League are already keeping a close eye on the financial ins and outs at the Macron and are yet to relinquish the transfer embargo imposed last year. That won’t happen until the financial accounts, now overdue, are filed.

Even then, rumours are abound that there is a funding shortfall for next season, which makes selling the club’s top asset more a necessity than a luxury.

Young, English defenders come at a premium and after Arsenal’s opening offer was rejected at the weekend it appears the Wanderers ownership are prepared to dig in their heels and get what they consider to be a fair price.

Given the horror stories Bolton have created in the transfer market in the last five years that in itself is reason for optimism.


http://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/sport/14485176.Why_Wanderers_must_not_let_Rob_Holding_go_on_the_cheap_like_Chelsea_star_Gary_Cahill/

It's a good, solid article but I fear it will fall on deaf ears in the end. I hope I'm wrong and I understand 2 million plus add ons has already been rejected but the likelihood of us getting seven million for Holding has to be pretty small.

Thae article itself points out that he has a little more than one year left on his deal and while the embargo is in place we can't even offer him a new and improved longer deal ourselves. Look what happened when Ameobi volunteered to play for free.

I think if we're offered anything north of 3 million in upfront cash the owners will take it, they don't seem to have much choice the way things stand. I fear that an add ons deal with Arsenal wouldn't do us much good, especially given their propensity for sending kids like Holding out on loan or leaving them in their own development squad only to be never heard from again.

If I were Ken and Dean I'd tell the Gunners 5 mil upfront minimum and they have to loan him back to us for all of next season. I'm not sure Everton will actually bid for him until and unless the question of Martinez is sorted quickly and as to Bournemouth, Eddie Howe has built a reputation for buying cheap and whether or not its justified I can't see him getting anywhere near the reported seven million asking price that is currently being bandied about. Worryingly to me that's already a drop from the ten million we're alleged to have initially said we wanted. If that's the case and we're dropping our asking price by thirty percent in a matter of days I fear it might be a sign that things haven't changed all that much.

Obviously we'll have to wait and see what Ken and Dean come up with on other fronts of potential investment but the way the axe is swinging behind the scenes and the talk of downgrading the academy again does suggest they might not be meeting with success that way. In which case we may well have no choice but to sell our best prospects at bargain prices if only to keep paying the wages of what Nat, boggers and others would rightly call the "overpaid ponces".