If you are like me, you must be wondering why Rafa does not have any money to spend this summer. So I decided to sit down and give it some thought and do some research. Firstly, you would have thought that the American owners would have given Rafa some cash to spend this summer, but they have not. Last summer, they splashed out almost £42m on Torres, Babel and Benayoun. It would have been very surprising if they were going to give Rafa another £40m to spend this summer. But truthfully, that is what they have to do if we want to challenge for honours. Just look at Chelsea and Manchester United, they basically have unlimited transfer budgets and look at how successful they have been in the last few years. Money has to be spent and unfortunately we do not have a lot of it.
Looking at this summer; Rafa has spent almost £10.5m on Dossena and Cavalieri. Degen came in for free so there was no cost there. Rafa has gotten some cash from sales; £10m for Crouch and a combined £6.5m from selling Riise to Roma and Guthrie to Newcastle. That makes a total income of £16.5m. There is a potential £4m coming in from the sale of Carson. But let’s not take the Carson fee into account as it is not yet in our bank account. So with £16.5 in and £10.5m out, that leaves us with £6m to spend. Now really, what can Rafa do with £6m? Nothing!
If Robbie Keane will cost £20m then Rafa would need an additional £14m which is not available. The signing of Barry from Aston Villa all hinged on selling Alonso. So now you can see why there is no way of Rafa to even start thinking of buying the likes of David Villa and David Silva. Okay, then you may ask, why have the Americans not provided any cash? It is simple, all the cash is going into building the new stadium. It is at a time like this I wish the guys from Dubai had taken over and then we would also have unlimited transfer budgets. But then again who knows how worse things could be right now if DIC had taken over. I for one thought that things would change for the best when the Americans took over but I have been quickly disappointed.
So let us not dream of the impossible of trying to sign £20m players when we simply can not. I firmly believe that we should just make the most of what we have right now and build using that. Whether it will be enough to win the Premiership I do not know but we just have to try. Rafa has done it before in Spain with Valencia by pipping the likes of Real Madrid and Barcelona. Let us have some faith with Rafa and start believing in what we have and not what we want to have or should have.
