Blackburn Rovers director of football Gregg Broughton said that the deal surrounding Ash Phillips’ sale ‘wasn’t a simple one’.
Phillips left earlier this summer for Tottenham for a reported fee of £2 million after triggering a release clause in Phillips’ contract.
Broughton delved into how his departure happened, and how Roverws managed to negotiate Phillips into signing a pro deal so they didn’t lose him for significantly less than what they got for him in the end.
“Tottenham were in for him heavily last summer,” said Broughton, via Blackburn’s Twitter account.
“When I first came into the club, I was told that this is a highly talented player that wasn’t going to be renewing his contract.
“Under the current football rules, whether we like it or not, he was a scholar, he hadn’t signed a professional contract.
“He could exercise a seven-day notice on that scholarship to leave the club on a tribunal fee which was likely to be about £200,000.
“Through a lot of hard work last summer, we eventually convinced him and his representatives to sign a professional contract, but it had to be caveated that there was a release clause in there.
Ash Phillips’ release clause in detail
Broughton went into detail as to how complex the release clause for Phillips was.
“The release clause wasn’t a simple one, the amount raised dramatically depending on the number of games he played last season.
“It got to a stage where, just before Easter last year, we sat down with the board of the club and with Jon Dahl and we said if we can get to this number of games with Ash, it has a significant rise.
“But that meant Ash had to have a certain amount of 90 minutes under his belt between now and the end of the season, and we all know the situation the club was in at the end of last season in terms of the league position.
“We made an executive decision that was unanimous that, at that stage of the season, [Tomasson] had to be picking what he felt was his strongest 11.
“Because of that, we knew we left ourselves vulnerable.
“Within 24 hours of the season finishing we had a notification from Ash’s representatives that he wanted to explore other options this summer.”