Koné hands in a transfer request at Sunderland

How many players lately have been associated with us, only to sign new contracts!

I hope he does sign tho, he looks like Distin's clone, and that in my eyes can't be a bad thing.

Not like we haven't done that ourselves in the past.

It's worrying the type of character's big money can bring into a club, we have got to be careful not to fill the squad with mercenaries!

There is so much more to building a strong team than just buying talented player's!

Hibbert's comment's about the club turning into a dog eat dog environment are ringing in my ear's!

Obviously it's the end of an era with Moyes' squad getting old and slowly disintegrating but kenwright, Moshiri, Koeman and his staff have got to address the ethos of the club and make sure the values that make us such a great club are not lost!

The premier league is a fast track for players getting unbelievably rich as best way to do that is swap clubs.

Still a few weeks of transfer craziness to suffer/enjoy. I'm trying to enjoy.

"I'd have found it very difficult to keep them because I always felt the right thing to do was what was right for the players".

We'll have a strong back line if he comes to us, good, strong player from what I've seen of him.

Stability, you mean like at Everton who have the third manager in four seasons plus a transfer window? err. . . ummm . . . oops.

Sunderland's last manager quit to become King, sorry, Manager, of England. He wasn't fired, nor was the club looking for him to go.

Or is it the third manager in 14 years? Looks slightly more stable from that perspective!

Like most Toffee-webbers I have changed jobs when it suite my interests and those of my family. The only difference with footballers is they have to do it in public eye, and the decimal point on their contracts shifts along a bit.

Oh and guess what; thanks to Bosman they enjoy the right to a contract relationship which is consistent with the European Court of Human Rights.

What am I missing? Oh I forgot, we fans think we own them too.

The only thing I want from a player is he has the requisite skill level, he respects the club, his team and his health regime, and when he crosses the white line that he gives 101%. Anything more is a bonus, and we regularly have those with good "people players" . . . . such as the likes of Baines (EOTC), Gerry (fans relationship), Ross (blue blooded) and so on.

Welcome Mr. Kone 2, if you arrive, you have behaved impeccably as I see it, and I am not suprised the Sunderland fans are sorry to see you go.

Rom, are you or your agent reading this? I respect your committment to a career. However if you want to go to Chelsea, the do it the right way, and stop messing everyone about, including yourself, and I suggest you change your agent. . . .

Williams
Kone
Funes Mori
Jagielka

Nothing over exciting or flashy, but they sure as hell will get the job done!

Fans so quick to cast aspersions on players characters without knowing the full story!

Looks to me like he's been pretty open and honest and most Sunderland fans seems to respect him.

Was one of the best defenders in the league for the 6months he's been here. Strong and physical type to toughen us up some more. I like what Koeman's trying to do...

All players are mercenaries so not arsed about him leaving Sunderland this way.

Referring to the Sunderland Kone - Moyes can't stand in the way of a player wanting to better himself. I haven't seen much of him but he looks to be a big unit this lad. If he plays alongside Holgate it will look like Laurel and Hardy out on the pitch!

If he comes, it will give us the 4 senior centre backs RK is looking for but I do wonder how much time Holgate will get this season as he looks to be an excellent prospect who needs minutes on the pitch.

Really depresses me every time I remember we've sold Stones for the likes of this complete random but let's get him, he'll toughen us up. Man City by Christmas after no second contract?

If I was Moyes, not that I'd want to be, I'd chill him out in the ressies for a few weeks until the window closed.

Once players sign long term deals I don't personally care whether they're happy or not, as with this Kone guy.

I want to be a Brazil 70 fan rather than sit through games watching Kone and McCarthy but it's not going to happen and I try to accept it, Ive certainly learnt to live with it.

If the disgruntled player goes out and plays shit their life will be hell pretty quick. Balance of power is with the club / fans for better or worse.

I'm pissed off that after sell on fees we've sold Stones for about the same money as Mangala went for to a newly promoted club that are strangely now one of our main rivals.

Gone and best forgotten.

How does that work then? Where is this mythical world where you sell a depreciating asset (year less on his contract, quite possibly less effective performances for a number of reasons but more likely splinters in his arse because he can't dislodge Williams from central defence) for an increasing amount of money?

I have a car I bought in 2010 for off-roading for £6K, only a bit more damage on it from said off-roading. You can have it for ten grand if you like?

As for Kone, I would suggest to anyone not convinced go on to some Sunderland websites, they rate him very very highly and are gutted he's leaving. I hope this comes off as our defense will be so much more solid than it has been the last few seasons.

If the two reported signings come off in the next couple of days our transfer window so far would be Williams, Gueye, Kone, Bolasie and Stekelenburg in, Stones out for a combined £20 mill give or take, that is fantastic business by the club so far and if we add Mata and one other it looks like Moshiri was being honest with the £100 million transfer funds promised.

It's yet another case of "say it enough and it becomes fact".

He's just completed a season mixing it between getting splinters and performing poorly, and what happened to his price tag?

Obviously your car analogy isn't entirely fair... given that it it's not even slightly close to being the same thing.

He's gone for the price of Mangala. That's absolutely ridiculous. Rio went to Man U for 30 in 2002.

I'm happy to disagree about this but to me it's simply small time Everton, as always. I don't like the phrase but "this is why we can't / don't have nice things" is pretty apt.

And Phil yes he's gone but he can't be forgotten as we'll have to watch him win trophies for the next decade and more a la Rooney.

SSN reporting we have had bids accepted for both Kone and Bolasie, yet none of them are Everton players, and the fees were agreed days ago.

No other club seems to take this amount of time to go from bid accepted, to new signing.

Kone is not a jaw-dropping OMG signing ( and let's hope he does better than his namesake) BUT he played in a defence that avoided relegation and showed fight. So if we stop allowing the opposition to walk though our defence at will. If we defend corners and allow some of us to stop having palpitations then he can only be a good signing.

Go on then Andrew, I'll bite. Sorry but you have to demonstrate the logic to that conclusion rather than just repeating the statement as if it were a fact (NB it isn't).

I've given you my reasons but I'll repost a few just to be clear. You even infer one yourself: "if he became disruptive we would sell him". So he has worse performances, shows he is less professional and not good enough for us for whatever reason but it's dead easy for some mug to take him away for an increased amount? Mourinho didn't come back in did he? Guardiola clearly wanted him right at this time and money is no object. That doesn't mean at all that if he watched another season of deteriorated performance (by your own admission the criteria by which we sell him), he is a year older (so less potential), he has a year less on his contract etc etc that his value increased. If he really intended waiting a year why would he not wait another to put pressure on Everton that he may just wind down the contract further, thereby increasing risk that Everton may get zero for him? Where was the bidding war driving Stones' price up? Guardiola wanted Stones now and that was it.

Sorry, I just don't get the logic of him being more valuable in a years time, you have to explain it to me.

Ernie

I was going to reply to Phil's point that Stones was worth less but we got more that Stones *value* was purely based on what someone was prepared to pay to do a deal at a given point in time. I didn't have a car analogy; that wasn't an analogy, I was just testing whether I could get ten grand out of someone for my car. No-one bit though sadly.

I suspect we'll have both of them next week.

I don't monitor other clubs' dealings, so I don't know if were the only slow ones when it comes to transfers. Pogba's move took an age, didn't it?

With all the money in the Premier League there's more agents than ever trying to get a piece of the pie. All of them demanding ridiculous fees that the buying club don't want to agree to. It's not just Pogba's shitbag agent that's doing it. Every other shitbag is... just at a slightly lower level.

If Kone still wants to go, the blame shifts back to him from the club and the fans side with the club again!

No lesser person than David Moyes appeared on screen this morning to confirm that Bill Kenwright has been speaking to him for some time about Kone 'and understands our position.'

How would we ever sign a player without 'Good old Bill'!

I consider that the best outcome from the sad situation of not being able to keep our best players. Don't sell him for basically the same money, after Barnsley get their cut, we turned down last summer.

But in classic Everton making up the numbers style we did, it's done, I grudgingly accept it, so onwards.

Also if Bill is still front of house for our transfer talks it explains a lot.

Our marquee signing will be a cheap gazebo from Argos.

Funny how Kone said yesterday that Kone said he handed in his request after speaking to Moyes. Something doesn't add up.

The most alarming thing is that Bill is still heavily involved in transfers! That explains everything. This cretin shouldn't be allowed anywhere near negotiations. He shouldn't be allowed near the tea room! Just wheel him with his misty eyes when we get to a cup quarter final and then lock him up again.

Bill is going to have problems keeping koeman quiet. Better sign some players bill.

I was under the impression the club had appointed a number of new personnel who were super qualified in all different aspects of running our club so surely somebody upstairs could be appointed to spend ours and Farhads cash and close out potential new signings within days rather than weeks. Bill is to put it nicely grossly incompetent and has the potential to balls up any new future signings as only Bill can with his haggling over every last penny etc.

I fear for us should this scenario go on Into the last week or so of the window. Farhad needs to pull rank here and remove Bill from any further future negotiations and allow himself or another to take these forward otherwise the Kone's and Bollasie's etc will be playing for either their respective current teams or somebody else who has decided to step in whilst Bill dithers over an extra £500k payment to an agent etc.

Pull ya fingers outta ya arse, Everton, and get these signings in quickly as we're already falling behind average teams and playing catch up. It is not how I saw our summer and start of the season going but reality s says we will be playing catch-up during the first few weeks unless we pull out a few surprise results starting tomorrow.

Fingers crossed we do get a few surprise results as it now seems any new additions won't be arriving til the early part of next week as is now the Everton way of going right up to the final day of every window!

...and then your alarm clock went off, as someone put it the other day.

Sell him for 60M??? To whom and how FFS?? The guy didn't want to play for us for a start. Thankfully we seem now to have a businessman in charge who makes the calls properly based on facts not what he wishes would happen. He didn't fall for Martinez's shite of "we're gonna be great soon", although, astonishingly, there are *still* people who support Martinez on this site.

You haven't done what I asked which was to explain the logic of how this is possible and you obviously don't want to (because you can't) so I'll not press any more.

£60m is the correct price when Mangala went there for £42m and in a league awash with money, everywhere apart from this place with the business men you mention currently having us with about a -£30m net spend this summer with the season starting tomorrow so let's not pop any champagne corks about them just yet. It's the usual small time Everton and yet we'll all be there tomorrow.

As a transfer fee was proposed but not accepted by Sunderland, what exactly was the lad doing in Liverpool earlier this week? Sightseeing!?

I think he will sign for us next week for the following reasons;

Club are happy to sell and get fee

Player wants to meet me move

Telling the player his new contract will be offered Sept 1st will piss him off even further, as, he really wants to leave, but now the club is making him look bad instead of the other way around, when they could have just accepted the fee, now if he turns down the offer of waiting for a new contract, he is the fall guy,

He'll feel disrespected that they want him to wait whilst they sort out other players coming in as s priority over assuring continuing his services

He'll feel that they are waiting for the window to close so they can low ball him and there's nothing he can do until Jan

They've fined him which he won't be happy about as he feels they are in the wrong

Moyes press conference shifted all the blam onto the player,

deep down Moyes is a disciplinearin and will now see this lad as questioning how s authority and a trouble maker he will never not want

I though amateur hour was long gone with Moshri there.

I am also not quite believing this £100M plus whatever we sell to spend, as we don't move in the market until we sell

Shaking my head - Ffs

If his heart wasn't in it for staying with us its unlikely his form / performances would have significantly improved, which would also put his value at risk.

He could also have got injured, which would also put his value at risk and people could have just dropped out of the running to sign him for what is now the second highest fee ever paid for a defender.

Conversely, the opposite to all of those things may have happened - in which case you would be right, especially if the market continues to boom and his value may have gone up - but the bottom line is he wanted to go, he put a transfer request in last season saying as much and keeping him would have been self defeating for everyone.

He is not worth £60m - for two reasons.

1 - we accepted £47.5m for him.
2 - no one offered more than £47.5m.

Therefore - his agreed value is £47.5m, not £60m.

He is still the 10th highest signing in history which, for a 22 year old defender who is far from the finished article, isn't bad.

Koné does that Larry David thing, looking into Moyes' eyes for ages.

1. You have to have at least 60m:
2. You have to be prepared to offer said 60m.

The fact that Mangala cost 42m and you seem to think Stones is worth almost half again as much is totally irrelevant. I could argue that I think he is worth a lot less than half of the value of Cristiano Ronaldo so that puts us quids in at 47.5m. But that statement is not relevant or realistic either.

Football is not generally based on sound business principles, granted, but it's not totally stupid, and does follow it's own logic, although it is skewed. Your assertions around how the market works are totally baseless, and if your logic is solely based on the comparison you've shown above as the only factor, then yeah, our opinions will always differ. I bet my reasoning takes me much closer to the mark of what actually transpires than yours does though.

I think we won't get Kone from Sunderland and that another centre back will join.

We'll start with funes mori and jags and Holgate in my opinion.

The Spurs game is a true test for them and us. We are underdogs and will have to fight. They have a stable team and finished 3rd last year.

3-4 new recruits will arrive before 31st.

Let's aim for not being outplayed or outfought between now and Christmas and take it from there.

Pretty much how I'm thinking.

We could get lucky and do better than that, or get unlucky and do worse, but there's no way I'm expecting or demanding anything other than Koeman getting a couple (3/4?) more in, getting them all fitter and and more 'disciplined' and then hopefully seeing some slow but sure improvement.

How much better really is stones than say Ryan shawcross ..(I am not a big shawcross fan) However, put shawcross at the heart of say PSG's defence and would he look ridiculously out of place???? No.

You could do that with so many top tier players and I just literally plucked him out as an example.

If you play the right system and right balance with your team then anything is possible A la Leicester.

It's not always about superstars it's about balancing the right type of midfielders say with the forwards you already have.

Look at someone like lukaku. His biggest strength is cute balls through for him to outpace and bully people and is a good finisher. So a player in the Mata mold would fit this as he is intelligent and is capable of seeing runs "vision" !
Where as a striker in the giroud mould thrives from great crosses into the box so Mata may not be the answer... Etc...

I am quietly confident we will be well pleased come the end of August. As you rightly so its about using the strengths of the players you have.

I expect Kone and Bolasie to join and 2 more before the deadline.

Hopefully talks that were planned this week with Lu and his camp have helped allay those concerns (for this season at least) but it's not at all difficult envisioning a scenario of Lukaku formally agitating to move coupled with a very tempting bid from Chelski at the 11th hour of the window closing. I think it's imperative we have a striker back-up plan implemented asap.

All opinions yes. Cheers, all Blues together.

Anyone else hope RK is playing mind-games over fitness before tomorrow? Bloody hope so, otherwise a very strange thing to admit.

He or Kone would do for me. As mentioned on another post, the 3 things I really like about Kone are 1) He is adored by the Sunderland fans and they are no mugs, unlike the Toons, 2) He is a big bugger and 3) he seems to have heart, going about trying to catch the move in the proper route by handing in a formal transfer request. Quite exactly why Moyes wants to fine him I'm not sure . . . . .

The fact Lukaku played makes me fear we'll lose him

Yes I'm a pessimist but...

Erwin stated two weeks back that Ronald and Bill were working 'hard' on transfers. The second has come from Ginger Gob Shite in the last couple of days.

Stones went for £47.5 million with an EXTRA £2.5 million if Shitteh win the Champions League. I don't think a deadline on winning was included or that Stones had to play. So maybe 2030!

Sunderland have accepted an undisclosed bid from fellow Premier League side Watford for defender Younes Kaboul.

The 30-year-old centre-back, who moved to Sunderland from Tottenham in 2015, has told manager David Moyes that he wants to leave for personal reasons.

Kaboul has been given permission to discuss personal terms with Watford.

"The club and the manager have shown an understanding of my personal circumstances and I am grateful for that," Kabul told the club website.

Seems a bit hypocritical to me. It's funny how Moyes won't let Koné join us and yet Kaboul has been given permission to leave.