Cirkin: Will he stay or will he go?

When Sunderland signed Dennis Cirkin from Spurs last summer we were all made aware of the £6m buy-back clause in his contract. At the time, that seemed like a distant, abstract problem. If he’s good enough to be worth that much, we’ll be laughing, we thought, as we were still scrapping about in League One.

A year and a bit on though, the notion that that clause will be triggered is becoming a more and more plausible reality.

And while turning a quick £5m or so profit on a player who helped get us promoted would be a sign of the excellent recruitment going on at Sunderland, losing Cirkin now would certainly feel disappointing.

So... what are the chances of it happening? 

Well. Having played the majority of his senior appearances in League One, it would be a dramatic leap up for Cirkin to start playing Premier League football, let alone Champions League. Spurs are well-stocked in the left back position with Ivan Perisic and Ryan Sessegnon sharing the position this season, while Ben Davies, probably the most similar to Cirkin stylistically, is also an option.

More pertinently, highly rated Italian full back Destiny Udogie is joining Spurs from Udinese in the summer. He’s younger than Cirkin and they paid twenty odd million for him in August, so you’d have to imagine he’d be ahead in the pecking order.

Considering he left Spurs because there didn’t appear to be a path into the first team, it would seem odd to return there when that path is similarly congested.

Perhaps what’s more likely then, is that Spurs would re-sign Cirkin with the intention of turning a profit on him. This poses the question, is he worth more than £6m?

Right now, I'm not so sure. 

Transfermarkt (big pinch of salt required) currently values him at just £1.8m. This is still a player coming to terms with men's football and its requirements. The signs are there for him to become very, very good, but there are still plenty of areas to fine-tune, rough edges to smooth over. Against Wigan for example, he was superb, against Burnley, less so. Talk of him being a Premier League quality player is, to my mind, premature. 

And amongst all this, what often gets forgotten is what's best for the player. 

Well I’m biased here (obviously) but I’d have thought Sunderland was as good a place as any, for a player like Dennis Cirkin. He's playing whenever he's fit, in front of big crowds, in an upwardly mobile side, full of young, attacking players. As much as it’s possible to tell these things, he seems to be happy here. 

So my hope is that January is too soon for Spurs to pull the trigger on any possible transfer. To my mind, it's in the interest of all parties for him to see out the season. 

Unfortunately, the Catch 22 that Sunderland find themselves in means that the better he becomes, the more prominently that buy-back clause hovers above his head. From now until 11pm on the 31st of January, it would be great if he could fly under the radar. 

More generally though, this is a sign of things to come. 

Our model is to buy young players and develop them. Inevitably that means that some of them will go on to be sold for a profit. It hasn't happened yet. We haven't felt the heartache of losing an integral member of this likeable squad. But it will happen. 

And when it does, I trust the recruitment team to continue with the excellent work they're doing. Seeing young players who've grown with us leave will sting, but it's the price we'll pay for progress.