None of us know what actually went on behind the scenes and what agreements were made, Gentlemanly or otherwise. However, what if the agreement that was made was first broken by Levy? He may have said I will be happy to stay at Spurs if we get into CL at the end of the year. If we fail to do that then he would be allowed to leave without pressure to stay or have a long protracted transfer saga.
If Levy suddenly changed his mind and tried to keep him and looked to be making his exit more difficult, will you still feel the same animosity towards him (Modric)?
As explained previously, the
animosity
towards him (which is hardly folk wanding about with pitch-forks and flaming torches hunting for Modric - so don't over egg that), is not about his aspirations but about how he behaved.
Firstly, he was tapped up by Abrahmovich, that much was clear. And so, where you make a claim that Levy
may
have reneged on a previous agreement, which seems plausible on the face of it, you are not accounting for the fact that he gave a very lengthy and detailed interview
before
Chelsea had made any offer for him or even contacted Spurs. How do you account for that? That was insulting and embarrassing for the club, and came within a very short time (after the season closed) of him stating repeatedly that he was happy where he was, had just signed a six year contract and believed he could fulfill his footballing ambitions with Spurs. At no point did he intimate that he was unhappy at the club, or with the failure to obtain CL football; nor did her, at any stage, mention a gentleman's agreement, or suggest that one was in place. This leads to a logical conclusion that the
gentleman's agreemnet
was something taht either didn't exist, or only began to crystallise in his mind in the form that he (or his advisors) later presented it,
after
Daniel Levy had told Cheslea where to go.
Secondly, and I have stated this once, already, what
exactly
would have been in it for Daniel Levy to give Modric greatly increased wages knowing that he was pretty much looking to get away. Surely that emolument accompanying a new six year contract was intended for the very opposite purpose - to guarantee some loyalty. You suggest that Modric may have inserted a clause (written or verbal) insisting that he should be allowed to leave if we failed to attain 4th spot - which, on the face of it, is a reasonable argument. But, if that were the case, surely it would have made more sense for master-negotiator, Daniel Levy, to wait until the Summer and the attaining of the CL spot, before allowing the increased wages...wouldn't it? Modric did have 4 years of his existing agreement left to run, anyway - why give him extra wages for a portion of a season on the understanding that he would be off if we didn't reach a certain level? It really doesn't make any sense.
Thirdly, if you are referring to the second Summer of discontent, then we would have had a better chance of attaining CL football if he hadn't gone on strike at the start of the seaosn, or looked less than 100% interested at the end of it. In any case, we did finish 4th and were massively unlucky to be excluded from the CL, so Levy would have had every right to argue, on semantic grounds, that we had qualified for the CL
only to have it snatched away from us
.
Fourthly, Levy never refused to sell him last Summer...he just refused to allow Real Madrid to dictate how little they wanted to pay for the player - and for the player to then act up is, really, him helping his prospective future employers to underpay for an asset to the detriment of his current emplyers - now, I don't know about you (and your
seeming
sensse of an elevated moral compass) but that, to me, smacks of positively immoral behaviour.
And the above argument has zero to do with having an understanding of the player's ambitions or desire to maximise his career - as you will see from my first post on the subject
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