Godsend Gray is helping Luton
Burnley’s signing of Andre Gray in 2015 from Brentford was for an undisclosed fee that has ranged from around £6 million up to I think it was £57 million when Sean Dyche joked about it as the figure appeared to go up and up.
It might have been undisclosed, but a third party, namely Luton Town, opted to reveal more because of the cut they were getting from the deal as part of the add on when they sold him to Brentford a year earlier for a fee of around £600,000 whilst ensuring they would receive a cut of any fee Brentford might receive for him.
At the time of Gray’s move to Burnley, Luton released a statement which read: “We are guaranteed to receive a shade over £1.1 million from the fee which will be spread over three seasons; an initial figure approaching £300,000 followed by two of just over £400,000 each.
“Should Andre contribute to Burnley’s success, resulting in a successful Premier League spell then we will also benefit further, to the tune of up to £700,000.”
Today, they have confirmed those figures and revealed that they have collected the entire £1.8 million to add to the £600,000 they received for Gray when he left Kenilworth Road.
The add on was believed to be 20% which points to the fact that we have now paid the full £9 million to Brentford that was so widely reported at the time. Had we not gone up a year ago and had we not stayed up this time, the fee would have been nothing like that.
Luton chief exec Gary Sweet confirmed that the latest windfall won’t increase the budget for manager Nathan Jones but that it will prevent them going cap in hand to shareholders.
He said: “We had kind of banked that anyway, without taking too many risks, we knew Burnley would stay up and we’re up to nearly two and a half million on Andre now. That’s been a terrific move for us and a terrific move for him and that’s probably where it’s positive all around.
“If he had stayed at the time, you’d have had a disgruntled footballer because you’re stopping his progression and that’s what you don’t want. There’s always a time for players to move on and that was the right time for Andre. I don’t think anyone here would regret that with the windfall.
“What those windfalls do for us is ease the burden on our shareholders as while we’re at Kenilworth Road, we’re a loss making business. So the only way we can avoid pulling on our shareholders to put a lot more money in is by making money on footballers, going on a good cup run, so the Andre thing has been a godsend to that situation.”
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