19 million.......roubles?

What's with these Russians?  Arugably their best player in generations, Andrei Arshavin, has performed admirably on the world stage and the Ruskies are pricing the guy out of his dream move!  

At the height of his fame after Euro 2008, Barcelona, the team Arshavin supported as a boy, offered 15 million pounds for the player, a great sum for an attacking midfielder/supporting striker in his mid to late 20's from a league where it ain't that hard to score.  What happened? 

His team wants like 19 to 25 million pounds! That's a ridiculous amount of money for an admittedly promising, yet ultimately untested player like Arshavin.  

Will Tottenham be the ones to pick him up? They have been seemingly pursuing him all summer and now need a good supporting striker to replace Keane.  They have also loosened the purse strings this summer on attacking talent. T'ham at one point seemed to be pursuing Pavyluchenko as well, but a similar extremely overpriced value was put on him, killing the deal before it started taking off!

It is well known that the Russian football league is the playground of some very wealthy and greedy Russian dudes.  It is also well known that it isn't the most competitive league in the world.  These guys clearly don't care about the good of the russian game.  With as much promise as their national team showed this summer, one would think that those teams would be happy let their players move to a bigger stage.  That level of competition only helps those players get better, and it allows the spotlight to shine on other talented players and pave the way for their careers.  However, preventing your relatively unknown players who have a chance to hit the big stage from getting there, simply out of purely greedy desires, is a real shame.  19 million pounds is a lot of cash for any team.  The issues with Arshavin's value clearly isn't "if we don't get this price, we'll lose money or we can't pay our bills."  It's a matter of the degree of profit.

Over the last few years, transfer prices out of Russia and eastern Europe have been a big stumbling block for players to move abroad.  A few years back, CSKA made a great run in the champions league, but none of their players were purchased, seemingly a natural outcome of such a good run.  Why?  Too expensive.

Jo recently came to Man city for 18 million pounds - however, he's a true striker, Brazillian, and has scored in over half of the games he has played in - an unbelievable feat.  Likewise, nery castillo came to man city last year from the Ukraine and had to buy out his own contract to do it! On top of that, a tidy sum was paid for his services.

This is all to say that if you are a relatively minor league (and one where you have to play in other leagues' off seasons because it is too cold to play in your country from october to april), you should allow your players to move on and populate other leagues.  If they are successful, more teams will look at you in the future as being a real source of talent.  At some point in time, you will become a league where others will want to play, not just a feeder for bigger teams. I almost want Arshavin to stay in Russia, as I don't want them to be rewarded for their greed.