The Peterborough Evening Telegraph
Chairman worked hard to keep his star players
Posh chairman Darragh MacAnthony has revealed he spent much of the final days of the transfer window rebuffing bids for his players.
Captain Hector Kyprianou. fleet-footed striker Ricky-Jade Jones and winger Kwame Poku were the most sought after men with struggling Championship side Luton Town making a late doors effort to sign the latter.
MacAnthony, speaking on his popular ‘Hard Truth’ podcast, also revealed Posh were able to re-sign defender Jadel Katongo on loan from Manchester City after a move to Rangers in the Scottish Premier League for the teenager fell through the day before deadline day.
He then pointed out City midfielder Mahamadou Susoho’s season-long loan to the Weston Homes Stadium remains in place and the 19 year-old will return to League One as soon as he is fit.
MacAnthony will now set to work on agreeing new contracts with star Posh players like Kyprianou and Poku.
"I had some data that suggested we had a 50% less chance of winning promotion if we lost Hector or Kwame,” MacAnthony said.
“And going up was more important than getting another £2 million-£3 million for a player, sums that wouldn’t have had a great impact on our chances, especially as there weren’t obvious replacements for either player out there.
“To be fair to the players as well we felt they could do better than the clubs that had been showing interest all summer.
"Luton did come in quite late in the window for Kwame after they sold a winger to the Premier League. It was a good bid, one in the millions, but at that stage we just told them we weren’t selling Kwame.
"Now the window is out of
the way I will be talking to the players we had bids for and I will try and get a new contract done for them. I just hope their families and agents are still talking to me!
"Signing Jadel again was massive for us. We had been keeping an eye on him all summer, but we thought he was heading to the Championship or even to Scotland, to Rangers I think it was.
"But Jadel rang Kieran (Scarff, Posh assistant manager) on the day before the deadline to say the Scotland move was off. City also contacted us and there's no doubt we are the only League One club they would have sent him to.
"We saw Jadel as someone who could cover four positions. We are having to pay more in terms of his wages than we did last season, but that wasn’t a problem.
"We were offered some Championship centre-backs, but clubs wanted us to pay £5k a week in wages to players we didn’t think were any better than the ones we already had.
"We didn’t ask City to let us out of the Susoho deal after he picked up his injury because we didn’t want anyone else to pick him up in January. Our deal is still in place and he will be back here in January, or sooner if he is fully fit.
“We paid out £2.2 million in transfer fees in this window which was the second highest amount in League One after Birmingham City."
Susoho played one game for Posh before picking up a serious muscle injury during a warm-up shooting drill ahead of a Carabao Cup tie at Oxford United..