Villarreal snippets, August 2

Villarreal are interested in signing Gonzalo Melero. Who he? Attacking midfielder/central midfielder who has been playing for Huesca the last couple of seasons. Plan would be to sign him for €4m, loan him back to Huesca for this season. A move for the future, I suppose.

FIFA have paid out World Cup money to teams that released players to the World Cup squads. How much Villarreal got in total I don’t know, but the basics are $8500 per player per day, with the days starting two weeks before the WC began and ending the day after the player’s team was eliminated (or won the whole thing). And, that 8500 is divided into three parts—one third to the team he was with when the WC started, one third to the team he was registered with in 2017-18, one third to the team he was registered with in 2016-17.

A simple example: Antonio Rukavina was registered with Villarreal for each of the two years preceding the WC as well as during it; Serbia were eliminated on the 27th of June and the WC began on the 14th. So Villarreal gets 28*8500=$238,000 for him. Denis Cheryshev was also profitable (Russia being eliminated July 7), I make it $314,000 for him. My guess is, if we toss in the dos Santos brothers’ partial fees, we probably got around $800,000 or so total. (And I don’t know if we got anything for King Salem or not; I expect that was covered in the terms of his loan deal). And no, given the enormous sums FIFA makes from the World Cup and the danger of injury, that’s not a lot of compensation, is it.

SPEAKING of Cheryshev, this article claims that “Cheryshev has planted his face across the transfer window”. That sounds truly painful, and one hopes Denis is not out for a week or two as a result.

If you listened to the friendly yesterday on Radio Vila-real, you may have heard Javi Mata referencing the Cheryshev-to-Everton rumors. If you didn’t, you missed out on lots of fun. First, Javi trying to pronounce “Toffees”; second, Javi trying to figure out what a toffee was. Hey, it was a pretty dull friendly, after all. I take my fun where I can get it.

However, I was truly disheartened that although he got on the pitch for Angers at some point (the official report on our website describes him as “Ketkeo”), Javi evidently was unaware that the player’s full name is Billy Ketkeophomphone. I was looking forward to Javi’s attempts to get his tongue round that one.

And finally, no, nothing new on Carlos Bacca. But I highly recommend this article about him and hope we see him in yellow yet!

Endavant!!