Neil Warnock has admitted he tried to sign Ollie Watkins for £2 million a couple of years before Aston Villa paid Brentford £28 million for him, as reported by Teesside Live.
When it comes to buying low and selling high, is there a better example of how to make such a strategy work than the boys at the Brentford Community Stadium?
Since being taken over by stat-obsessed Matthew Benham in 2014, the Bees have made huge profits on the likes of Andre Gray, Chris Mepham, Neal Maupay, Said Benrahma and Ezri Konsa.
Their biggest ever sale, however, came in September when Aston Villa invested about £30 million in Watkins, a winger transformed into a ruthless penalty pox predator by Brentford coach Thomas Frank.
And, ahead of Middlesbrough’s meeting with the Bees this weekend, Warnock can’t help but wonder what might have been if his Cardiff side had taken a punt on a forward who was strutting his stuff in League Two at Exeter City as recently as 2017.
“I tried to get Cardiff to sign Watkins at Exeter,” the veteran tactician explains. “But they thought £2m was too much! He went for £2m (to Brentford) and then £30m (to Aston Villa)!
“I always saw him as a striker, even though he was playing out wide.”
Brentford might have lost last season’s top scorer over the summer but, in typical Bees fashion, they appear to have landed an ideal replacement.
After finding the net for fun at Peterborough United, Ivan Toney has made a mockery of those who predicted he would struggle in the league above.
With ten goals in ten Championship games, a man with more braces than a dentist’s office is leading the Golden Boot race at present.
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