When he is finally announced as a Swansea City player, Wilfried Bony will become Swansea’s club record signing by quite some way. The shelling out of £12million pounds (he will potentially cost £14m with add ons) shows how far the club has come and how the transfer fees for players have changed dramatically over the years.
Many Swans fans (including myself) remember the club shelling out big money on Paul Connor from Rochdale over 10 years ago and so seeing the Bony fee makes everything hard to believe. Connor was signed in 2004 for the massive amount of £35,000 which seemed a lot at the time but is now just 1 weeks wages for a top Swansea player!
The club have spent money as they have progressed up through the leagues and each time they spent, fans would generally be stunned to see a club struggling to pay the electricity bill a few years back now splashing the cash. The signing of Kevin Amankwaah for £250,000 caused an upsurge in the sale of Rennies in Swansea in 2006 and the acquisition of Craig Beattie for £800,000 in 2009 caused similar surges in the brandy departments of most Swansea supermarkets. Signing players for those large amounts of money just didn’t happen in Swansea as we left the big spending to our little brothers down the road. However, progress and promotion to the Premier League meant the club broke the record again and again with the arrival of Danny Graham for £3.5m in 2011 and Pablo Hernandez for £5.5 last summer!
The signing of Bony is on a different level though. When The Liberty Stadium opened up in 2005 it was a momentous occasion for the club. The 22,000 all seater stadium cost a total of £27m to build and fit out and although the club have plans to develop it further it is still a great stadium for fans to come and enjoy their football.
There was a lot of fanfare and comment about the cost when the stadium opened but here we are in 2013 signing 1 player for half of what it cost to build our whole stadium!!!
£12 (or £14m as it could end up being) is a huge amount of money (its 10,000 seats worth actually) but there is no doubt that
a) the club needed a striker
b) good, top quality strikers cost a lot of money and
c) the club are living within their means and the purchase is affordable.
The deal for Bony makes even more sense if you take into account the £5m received from Sunderland for Danny Graham in January! This makes the actual ‘striker’ outlay only £7m which is very good for the top goalscorer in the Dutch league last year.
All Swans fans will be welcoming Bony into the club with open arms and if he shows passion, commitment and an eye for goal, he will be adored by the Jackarmy. I believe that this ‘fox in the box’ is what the Swans need and will allow Michu to play in his ‘real’ position behind the striker which makes the Swans front 2 very very exciting! Add Wayne Routledge, Pablo Hernandez and Nathan Dyer to the mix and you have pace, trickery and skills to dazzle opponents both in the league and in Europe next year.
The Swans squad is now looking strong for the new season and Bony is the player fans have been waiting for all summer. When he walks out against Man Utd on August 17th we will not only be seeing a record breaker but a player who cost as much as the West and South stands put together and that after Paul Connor, Kevin Amankwaah and Craig Beattie is simply bloody amazing!
Welcome to Swansea Wilfried! You Jack Bastard!!!