Southampton must be laughing all the way to the bank

What a terrible bit of business.  Buying Lallana for a reported £27m may end up being worse than United buying Herrera for £32m.  He wasn't even the most efficient attacking midfielder at Southampton last season and furthermore he didn't separate himself enough from his teammates to justify his price tag.

	Lallana	Rodriguez	Davis	Ward-Prose	Ramirez
age	26	24	29	19	23
app (sub)	37(1)	30(3)	28(6)	16(18)	3(15)
mins	3082	2561	2492	1616	526
goals	9	15	2	0	1
assists	6	3	7	2	3
chances	68	20	57	39	14
npg90	0.26	0.53	0.07	0	0.17
gcp90	0.44	0.63	0.32	0.11	0.69
ccp90	1.9	0.7	2.1	2.2	2.4
ap90	0.21	0.11	0.25	0.11	0.52
ccv	11.1	14.3	11.9	5	21.7
pass %	84.6	76.6	84.3	87.2	80.9
bp %	50.3	49	42.4	43.6	38.9
sacc %	41.4	31.7	21.8	35	23.8
shot %	18	14.9	6	0	4.8
TTI90	13.9	12.9	13.2	9.2	19.5
avg rk	2.9	3	3.1	3.3	2.6

Gaston Ramirez who played sparsely due to falling out of favor with Pochettino and injuries comes out on top. Lallana comes second, but only barely ahead of Rodriguez & Steven Davis. If Lallana is worth £27m, Rodriguez is worth at least that much being he is 2 years younger and Steven Davis should not be sold for anything less than £20m. And what about 19-year-old James Ward-Prose? He is already a better passer and turns over the ball much less at 7 years Lallana's junior. He's got to be worth £50m to Man United and at least £30m to the rest of the Prem.

Those numbers above are not worth £27 and the argument that it is because 'he's English' just proves my point. He's a product of the English press hype machine. We paid £8.8m for Coutinho, less than one-third what we did for Lallana, the Brazilian is still only 22-years-old and already a better player.  Basically we just paid that much for someone to keep the seats warm for Gerrard, Hendo, Sterling, Can, and Coutinho.