Don’t be sad because we have just sold one of the most exciting players to come out of our academy, be excited about what it could mean for us in the future.
There are so many positives to take out the sale of Nathan Patterson to Everton and you don’t even have to dig that deep to find them.
For a start, we have just broken our transfer record with a player who wasn’t a regular starter – yes, that statement is slightly disingenuous because if he played anywhere else on the park he would probably have been getting more game time but, it is fundamentally true, for now and the foreseeable future, we can live without Patterson.
Secondly, it will give Giovanni van Bronckhorst the opportunity to add his own players, he won’t get it all to spend but he will certainly have enough to add one or two new faces where he feels we need them most.
The biggest reason though, is that Ross Wilson has now set a benchmark for how much we value our players at – they will only ever be as much as someone is willing to pay for them but, if Patterson is worth £16million to us, the likes of Glen Kamara, Joe Aribo, Ryan Kent, Ianis Hagi and Alfredo Morelos all make strong cases for being valued significantly higher when all factors like international status, age and importance to the team are considered.
Previous figures of around £10m for Kamara and Aribo can now be deemed as laughable, the missing piece of the self-sustainability plan was always going to be whether or not we could sell players for big fees, well,