What if nobody pays his "valuation"? What if Diaz only wants Barca?
The club simply has no power to set his market value or tell him which club to sign for. This only works if we're happy for him to walk for nothing in 2 years, something which imo we should be very wary of.
I’m not entirely sure I agree with you here.
We DO have the power to set the market value and we can reject any offer we deem too little, but it DOES require us to be willing to let him walk for free in 2 years.
I don’t see that as being as big a risk as you, mainly because if he plays his part in us winning stuff over the next few years, I’ll not care if he leaves for free approaching 31, when his best years will be behind him. It’ll also be in his interest to continue to play at a high level if he wants to get a move to Barca as a free agent.
For me, this is all part of the negotiation dance anyway - if we say we’ll listen to offers, then teams like Varca will be emboldened to put in derisory offers and play on the “he only wants us card”.
Saying we won’t listen to offers and have no interest in selling counters that right away. It means we can peg the offer to a Saudi Bid and if Diaz rejects that, that’s on him, but that’s now the price that people have to work from - so Barca don’t get to come in and chuck £35m on the table and we spend our time trying to get them to up the bid.
It’s kind of similar to the Wirtz situation with Leverkusen - Bayern thought they had him in the bag and wanted to play the “cunt trick” of low-balling. We’re the Saudi bid, though now we’re preferred we’ll try to leverage that price down, but not at the expense of Leverkusen telling us to piss off, thereby opening up the floor again to other teams - but Leverkusen are absolutely setting his market value.
That depend entirely upon how much the other side WANTS the player.
So if Barca WANT the player, they’ll pay what we want and if Diaz WANTS the move he’ll do what he has to do to make it happen - but while he has a 2 year contract, his options are limited and fraught with difficulty.
All things being equal - I’d probably keep him given we’re spending a fuck load on Wirtz.