Birmingham City once spurned the chance to sign Wilfried Zaha for £100,000.
Zaha, now 31, was all set to join Blues in his teens before David Sullivan pulled the plug. Crystal Palace were strapped for cash at the time and in desperate need of funds.
Paul Montgomery - head of recruitment at Blues between 2008 and 2011 - claims to have agreed a deal for three of Palace’s finest academy products, one of whom was Zaha, which wouldn’t exceed £1million. Victor Moses, who has since won a Premier League title with Chelsea, and Nathaniel Clyne were the other two players Montgomery had arranged to sign.
Montgomery said: “When Crystal Palace were in receivership I did a deal with the receiver, which now is unbelievable. I did a deal, £1million for Moses, Clyne and Zaha. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. The split was quite simple: £600,000 for Moses, £300,000 for Clyne and £100,000 for Wilfried. He (Zaha) was a kid then but he could have been anything.
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“Moses would have played, Clyne would have been a great back-up for Stephen Carr and Wilfried could have been anything, which is what’s happened."
A £15million transfer to Manchester United backfired on Zaha but he returned to Palace and matured into the talent Montgomery always believed possible. After being linked with numerous big money transfers in recent seasons, Zaha finally left Selhurst Park for Galatasaray in the summer and his skills have now graced the Champions League.
Despite pushing desperately to complete the transfer, Montgomery was informed in no uncertain terms by Sullivan - who, alongside co-owner David Gold, sold Blues to Carson Yeung in 2009 - that they were dealing in the present, not the future.
“I pushed and I pushed,” Montgomery continues. “I said to the manager: ‘Alex (McLeish), what’s happening with this? I’m getting pressure from a couple of other clubs’. The message I got from Mr Sullivan was: ‘We can’t buy for the future’. How are we going to succeed if we can’t buy for the future?”
Montgomery is excitable as he goes through the list of Blues nearly men. “I had another,” he goes on. “I had a French boy, (Sambou) Yatabare, for €90,000. I got an email from Mr Sullivan saying: ‘He won’t cost €90,000, he’s £3 million’.
“I went, ‘No, his fee is €90,000 to the French FA’. But he’d listed hotels, flights, wages, his mother’s flights… He’d built it up so the player was going to cost us £3million. Really, he didn’t fancy it so he wanted to put a negativity on it.”
Seamus Coleman was another. “I had a deal for £50,000 with Sligo for him. He came on trial not once, but twice. For some reason we declined on that. I resurrected another deal for Nathaniel Clyne but that wasn’t taken. That’s life, that’s football.”
Yeung’s takeover was supposed to bring success to Birmingham City but the Hong Kong businessman dragged the club’s historic name through the mud before ties were eventually cut. Manager McLeish and talent spotter Montgomery were promised a whopping transfer kitty to close the gap to the Premier League’s elite.
“The £50million was never there, let’s be brutally truthful,” Montgomery says. “I think they made a rod for their own back by coming in and saying, ‘We’ve got this, we’ve got that, to spend’, instead of just saying, ‘Right, we don’t have a lot’.
“I recruited for two budgets - a two balloons and a goldfish budget and a £50million budget - and we ended up with a two balloons and a goldfish budget.”
Montgomery only met Yeung once during their two seasons working together. If McLeish and Montgomery wanted to sign a player they would have to fax Yeung’s Hong Kong office. “We’d put the player on paper, the deal, the wages and agent’s fee, and then I’d get the manager to sign it to say he’d agreed.”
So often during Yeung’s reign these faxes wouldn’t be returned or, when they were, McLeish and Montgomery didn’t receive the answer they’d been hoping for.
The name Mousa Dembele prompts a wince. “Mousa Dembele was an easy peasy deal,” Montgomery explained.“The guy wanted to come, his agent wanted him to come, he was £2million, as simple as that, from AZ Alkmaar.
“He was a player I’d seen playing against Newcastle as a kid, no-brainer - Alex agreed 100 percent with that. Three months… I don’t know if this is right, but I’m sure Carson Yeung was sitting there with his kid playing fantasy football and they hadn’t heard of him. ‘Who’s he? Dembele? I haven’t heard of him’.
“I asked Alex to send an email and, I remember it clear as day, he wrote: ‘We will get double figures (profit on the fee for Dembele)’. It went on so long that the agent said: ‘Listen, we can’t wait any longer’. He didn’t want to go to Fulham, he wanted to play for Birmingham.”
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Montgomery is convinced the Carling Cup win would have been the springboard to future success had Yeung heeded the warnings in the previous two transfer windows. “If they had done what they promised to do, before we got to the Carling Cup final, we could have kicked on to a top six place.
“That following season I’d arranged a relationship with Hoffenheim. We were going to send young players to Hoffenheim and they were going to reciprocate that. As part of that I got a paper for first option on (Gylfi) Sigurdsson for €7 million. (Pappis) Cisse - a striker who scored a lot of goals for Newcastle when he came to England - was also lined up.
“I think they thought: ‘We’ve finished ninth in the league’, and we were mid-table when we were on the Carling Cup run. But we had a thin squad and we kept emphasising that it needed strengthening.”
Then, that happened. Injuries to key players decimated McLeish’s squad and, despite winning silverware for the first time in 48 years, Blues were relegated on the final day in 2011. Roman Pavlyuchenko dealt the fatal blow with Tottenham’s winner at White Hart Lane and Blues were back in the Championship.
Recalling events is all the more painful for Montgomery due to the fact he’d agreed to sign Pavlyuchenko the previous January, initially on loan with the option to buy, but Yeung and his man on the ground at St Andrew’s, Peter Pannu, wouldn’t sign it off.
“My story sadly ended when we played Spurs on the last day of the season,” Montgomery reflects. “It’s sad to talk about it. Who scores the goal? Pavlyuchenko. Me being me, I sent an email: ‘I hope you’re proud of yourself, the man who put us down should have been in a Blue shirt'. ‘You’re sacked.’ ‘No problem.’
“It was a bit pathetic really but it’s just the way I was. I’m a very passionate guy and I was distraught. Two weeks later Pannu rang me and said: ‘Listen, I’m sorry about before, I think you’re better off working for me, finding the players’.
“I said: ‘Nah, no thanks’. I work for the club. I always wanted to be with the club. I’m a club man, not a chairman’s man.”