There have been a spate of stories this week highlighting the fact that Fulham will have to fork out £4m for Armando Broja’s loan fee should the Chelsea striker not start all of their remaining fixtures this season.
It is a strange situation as Broja hmself hasn’t done a lot wrong. He actually perked up Fulham’s attack when he replaced Timothy Castagne at Wolves last week and made Alex Iwobi’s consolation goal by intelligently turning Antonee Robinson’s cross into the path of the Nigerian international. Both Fulham and Broja expected the Albanian international to become a regular following his deadline day loan switch, but nobody could have predicted how a rejuvenated Rodrigo Muniz would leave him kicking his heels on the bench.
Perhaps the most eye-catching element of this story was the nugget in the Daily Mail a few days ago suggesting that Muniz’s five goals have increased his value by £20m. That seems somewhat fantastical, but with the sizeable pots of prize money linked to league finishing positions, I don’t think Fulham will be too put out at having to stump up the full loan fee for Broja. The lesson for Molineux is surely to play your best players – and Muniz more than deserves to keep his place in the starting line-up.
It’s nice that Broja finally did something right. When coming on for his two previous appearances, he was incredibly lazy. Didn’t run, didn’t challenge for anything, didn’t jump for headers, nothing. And probably isn’t giving Marco much to think about in training either.
Still, if the net result of this is we’ve paid £4m to get goals out of Muniz, then that’s fine.
All the stories originate from the Daily Fail though. £4m is the maximum they will pay the agreement obviously wasn’t £4m or nothing. The fee is on a sliding scale it will not be £4m.