David Sullivan has warned that Newcastle United are in danger of losing Demba Ba for as little as £3.5m this summer.
The West Ham United co-owner concedes that allowing the Senegal striker, who has scored 16 goals in 21 Premier League appearances this season, to join Newcastle on a free transfer last summer was one of the biggest mistakes of his life.
“I’m told he’s got a £7m get-out at Newcastle and he gets half the money, so if they sell him for £7m they’ll only net about three,” said Sullivan in an interview with the fans’ website W*** H** T*** I D**. “Getting £3m is not bad but, for a player of his quality, it’s not fantastic. And Newcastle paid his agent £2m to get him out of here [West Ham].
“Newcastle keep denying it but I think you’ll see in the summer he will either leave Newcastle or get a monstrous rise to stay there.”
West Ham, then in the Premier League, bought Ba from Hoffenheim for around £500,000 in January 2010 on a £35,000-a-week salary, his seven goals in 12 appearances failing to prevent the team, then under Avram Grant, from dropping into the Championship. “Demba Ba signed a three-and-a-half-year contract with us,” recalled Sullivan.
“We had a deal where his salary would be halved if we were relegated and he said, ‘Well, on that basis I have got to be allowed to walk if we get relegated.’ What we should have said was that, if we don’t halve your salary, you haven’t got a get-out. The failure to put that one line in the contract cost us very, very dearly. It’s one of those mistakes that happen but it’s probably one of the worst mistakes I have ever made in my life.
“If he was with us now and his knee had held up, because he did have a very, very bad knee, I think we’d be 15 points clear [in the Championship].”
Ba’s presently manageable, degenerative knee condition – the striker has what Newcastle’s manager, Alan Pardew, describes as “a deficiency” in the joint which prompted consultants to advise Stuttgart and Stoke City to pull out of proposed £7m moves to sign him from Hoffenheim – now appears the sole barrier to the striker enjoying a highly lucrative future on Tyneside or elsewhere.
Although Newcastle decline to discuss the matter it is thought they are keen to offer Ba a new deal. The striker’s current agreement sees a significant percentage of his wages delivered on a pay-as-you-play basis. This is a legacy of his current contract having reportedly being redrafted after what Pardew described as “issues with his medical”.
