If Declan Rice is to leave West Ham this summer, it will be because a cheque with a significant number of zeroes on it has been slapped down on the negotiating table.
David Moyes has been running out of ways to paraphrase Harry Enfield’s “loadsamoney” and after the final game of the season plumped for “one of those steel vans that have the cash in it” to describe the kind of offer that would convince him to let Rice leave.
This being football, no one will say an actual number for fear of firing the starter’s pistol on a haggle, but £70million appears to be the going price that would be hard for Messrs Gold and Sullivan to turn down. For context, West Ham received their record transfer fee three years ago when Marseille paid £26m for Dimitri Payet.
There is something of a history of the Hammers selling their very best talent up the league, stretching back to the likes of Rio Ferdinand, Joe Cole and Frank Lampard.
The last of those will hope to convince Rice of the merits of jumping on the District line and crossing London to Chelsea, who ensured they will be able to offer him Champions League football next season with a 2-0 win over Wolves on the final day of the campaign. He will also have the ability to dangle the carrot of playing alongside best mate Mason Mount, who stayed on at Stamford Bridge while Rice was released at the age of 14.
At West Ham, Rice will be the figurehead of the team. When (if?) Mark Noble eventually retires, he will take on the mantle of bleeding claret and blue when required and if Moyes is still there, carrying the armband that gives a player that ability.
“My idea is to build West Ham around Declan Rice,” Moyes said last month.
“I see Declan Rice as a future captain of West Ham, for many reasons I am looking forward to working with Declan and unless I am told different or things change he is a very big part of the club to me.”
Presumably, that will involve Rice the midfielder, rather than Rice the defender. It may not be the case if he moves on.
His chief suitors – Chelsea – are thought to be considering him as a long-term solution at centre-half, which is Rice’s natural position and the one he came through the West Ham youth teams playing.
Using stats database and comparison tool Smarterscout, we can see that as a defensive midfielder he is pretty closely aligned with the likes of Tanguy Ndombele and Geoffrey Kondogbia in terms of output and playing style, but is outstripped by both of them when it comes to attacking output.
However, Rice at centre-half goes from being a midfielder who cannot create much to being a defender who comparatively can – but in the last two seasons he has only played 123 minutes of football in defence.
It would represent a risk for Chelsea to sign a player who has ostensibly become a defensive midfielder to play as a centre-back, but one that could have huge payoff. When Liverpool identified a defender they felt could add a passing game as well as a defensive one, they bit the bullet to spend £75m on Virgil van Dijk.
Rice is by no means the same sort of player, but ball-playing centre-backs are hard to find. They are one of the few clubs who might actually have the “loadsamoney” required to buy him.
The player himself will have a say too though and that decision comes down to a question of identity for a man who is no stranger to tough decisions about his career – remember he walked away from Ireland to play for England instead. Does Rice want to be West Ham captain for the next decade in midfield, or fight for a place in the Chelsea defence, the Champions League and perhaps a title race? It would be very hard to turn down the latter.
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from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/301yfx9
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