"He's had an astonishing, astonishing offer from City and we can't compete with that. We had to take it seriously and that is the way we react with our players and finally we decided to start negotiations with City."
"During the day we have gone on with negotiations and we've got closer to each other. But the deal is not already done. So hopefully we will find an end tonight or tomorrow morning.
"I would prefer to keep him, not to get the money. But the money now is really the issue...he was a key player and took the next step.
"It will be very difficult -- apart from Bayern Munich -- to compete with the Premier League in the future.
"It is a big blow if he is leaving Wolfsburg but, you know, it's a difficult situation...It's really a situation that nobody was thinking about when he started with us."
Allofs said the Premier League's television money posed a huge challenge for all of German football.
"Even the last team in the Premier League has much more money than Bayern Munich in TV money so this is already the situation.
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-Klaus Allofs, Director of Sport, VfL Wolfsburg on midfielder Kevin De Bruyne.
That from a club owned by VOLKSWAGEN! For soccer newcomers, players move not through trades as they do in the States but through straight sales,"transfers" they're called. There are two parts to the finances of a transfer, one, the amount of money the capturing club pays to the parent club. In this case that is reputed to be £54 million or $83.16 million. Fair piece of change but that's not what Klaus Allofs is talking about. When Allofs says "He had an astonishing, astonishing offer from City," he talking about the second component of a transfer fee, the player's wages. Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona has the highest wages in world soccer at $71 million/year. The highest paid player in the EPL is Wayne Rooney at $24,024,000, I hope I did the conversions correctly there, that is a significant disparity with Messi, but I operate on the shaky assumption that my math is correct. De Bruyne makes $11,300,000 at Wolfsburg if my info is correct that he is paid 10,000,000 Euros and if I did the conversion from Euros to dollars correctly. So, what would be an "astonishing, astonishing offer from City"? Yaya Toure is currently City's highest paid player at $19,219,000. My guess is City has made Kevin De Bruyne an offer that will make him the highest paid player in the EPL, so north of Rooney's $24 million. "Astonishing, astonishing" suggests to me, I'll guess, $40 million a year. On those assumptions, City's total outlay for De Bruyne, total out of pocket from City, is about $123 million.
More from ESPNFC:
"I would prefer to keep him, not to get the money. But the money now is really the issue...he was a key player and took the next step.
"It is a big blow if he is leaving Wolfsburg but, you know, it's a difficult situation...It's really a situation that nobody was thinking about when he started with us."
Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan bin Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, "thank you" is not enough. Your Highness, what you have done since 2008 is "astonishing, astonishing." Your commitment to excellence no matter what the cost is incomprehensible. You have done for your nation in garnering good will in Britain and throughout the soccer world more than anything that the U.A.E. could have done with that money. You have become the U.A.E.'s most successful ambassador to the world. Allahu Akbar, Sheikh Mansour and, if it is not blasphemous for me to say, my Allah bless you.
