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Banks respects Harris’ firm stance on transfer policy
With Bayern Munich under new management after former Barnsley head coach Anthony Harris jumped ship to the EFL 1 giants, many people have been wondering what direction the Aussie coach will take the club.
Recent season under former manager Jon Banks had seen them yo yo up and down the league with their league position ranging from 8th in Season 1 & 2, to a lowly 12th in Season 3 and finishing strong with a 4th placed finish last season.
Banks has recently been unveiled as the new Norwich City manager as the Englishman heads back to where it all started in an attempt to turn the Canaries’ fortunes around after a period of steady decline.
Harris landed the job after his recent work with Premier League team Barnsley. Harris guided the Tykes to impressive Premier League finishes over the previous few seasons and after a brief time out of football after an even briefer spell at Portuguese giants Sporting Lisbon, he returned to South Yorkshire to guide them to safety again last season.
Harris has previously stated that no one could have done what he did with Barnsley so obviously the man doesn’t lack confidence and when the Bayern Munich board set out in search of a replacement for Banks there was only 1 man for the job.
The Australian beat off other candidates such as Aston Villa manager Keith Drummond, Sporting Lisbon head coach Jason Fortune and even Arsenal manager Darren Humphries to land the gig and he’s wasted no time getting stuck in.
While other managers are taking this down time to recover from the long, hard season…Harris is shaping the club into what he wants it to represent and one thing that comes hand in hand with that is transfer deals.
It’ll come as no surprise that many of the players that Jon Banks left behind are on the wish list of many clubs across Europe this off season and the two gems of the squad are without question;
21 year old Dutch international B_Verbruggen & 20 year old Englishman A_Wharton.
The goalkeeper & defensive midfielder respectively were both signed by Banks in previous auctions with the club signing both players well under market value and while some of the fans, board members etc may see an advantage to ‘cashing in’ on said two players, new Bayern manager Anthony Harris certainly doesn’t.
News flooding out of both Turin & Munich is that Bayern Munich have turned down, not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 separate offers from Juventus for the services of both youth players with the clear message eventually getting through to the Juventus board that neither player are currently for sale.
Bayern released a short statement/warning that neither player is to be sold this pre season despite the mammoth deal that Juventus laid out for the German team.
The Bayern respective did hint that a deal for either or both players could be possible in the future despite the club being unwilling to listen to offers right now.
We caught up with Juventus manager Andy Banks as he was heading into the Juventus facility to study match day tape of this season to try to figure out a way to get his players to score more. Here is what he had to say on the issue:
“It’s certainly disappointing, once we heard that Bayern would be replacing a failing manager with a better one we felt like if we made a big enough offer that we could land both players but it just wasn’t to be despite all of our efforts.
We tried everything we could, increasing our original bid by 33.3%, nothing and if I’m honest I don’t blame Harris.
He wants to build around the two lads and for that I respect him.
If you stand back and look at the final offer we had turned down, we were massively overpaying for a very small increase in skill but that’s what you have to do at the very top.
You have to pay a premium for the best players, then you have to pay ‘Outspoken manager tax’ and then when clubs see that you have £260,000,000 in the bank they instantly up their price by 20% despite the fact that we’ve spent the majority of that stockpile already.
Harris didn’t play those games though. He was blown away by our first offer but stuck to his guns about wanting to keep the two lads and even though we tried everything to change his mind it didn’t work and we now have to move on.”
In previous season, Banks & Harris have been at each others throats with the Aussie going as far as to block Banks on all social media platforms but since his arrival in Germany the two seem to have mended their relationship and are once again on speaking terms.
Banks had this to add:
“Harris is clearly a top top manager and the obvious choice to take Bayern to the next level. A level that their previous manager clearly couldn’t make happen.
Despite us not agreeing to a deal this week, we’ve buried the hatchet and I’m sure when we meet Bayern Munich next season we’ll share a bottle of wine after the game.”
So what is next for Juventus? With seemingly less and less targets becoming available for the Italian club to chase, will they be forced to rely on the NON FFO auction? A path that has a lot of uncertainty?
Or can the make a little bit of magic happen elsewhere?
Failing that they may just have to start next season pretty much an unchanged outfit, but will that be good enough?
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