Phil Sumbler
Joel Piroe was the big name departure from SA1 in the summer transfer window with the forward making a move to Leeds United a week before the window closed after a summer of speculation.
Leeds were just one of a host of clubs that were linked with the forward over the course of the summer with Everton, Nottingham Forest, Atalanta and Southampton all reported interested parties but it was Leeds who came forward with the concrete bid and eventually took him to Yorkshire where Piroe scored on his debut for them.
The Swans had done what they could to secure an extended contract for Piroe but Andy Watson revealed on Saturday that the demands of the player and his representatives were not something the club was prepared to match and because of that a sale became inevitable.
Piroe scored more than 40 goals for the Swans in his two years in South West Wales which was always going to attract interest from elsewhere and with the Dutchman in the last year of the contract press reports that he would be allowed to run down the contract proved to be unfounded and were never really likely to be the case given the way that the club finances need to operate.
“I had a lot of conversations with Joel,” Watson said in an interview with the Swans official website.. “I have had conversations with a lot of players. I have said there are two things I will be – I will be fair and I will be honest.
“We ultimately wanted to try to keep Joel but what he wanted and what his representatives wanted wasn’t within the structure of the football club.
“We felt we couldn’t break that structure because of the knock-on effect. That was coupled with an offer that came in. We had an internal valuation and that was met and exceeded in some contingents.
“When you are getting a return on an investment, he indicated that he wasn’t going to sign a new contract and you can’t compete with a club who have parachute payments, that all came to a point where you say what do we do, we get the absolute best for the football club.
“We can get something we can then reinvest and strengthen as we go.”
After some very poor decisions on player contracts over the course of the past five or six years it is relatively refreshing to hear that we will not necessarily just bow to demands although the nature of a football club will sometimes require some level of stretching on demands to compete with ambition but with thirteen new players arriving during the course of the window it would be a pretty poor accusation to throw at the current setup that we did not look to do everything that we could in the window.
As it stands a £12m fee for Piroe with less than a year left on his contract is a much preferable deal to either letting him run down his contract and leaving for nothing or breaking the bank (or at least stretching it too far) to get a new contract signed. Thus probably the right decision for the reasons outlined by Watson.
