Latest happenings as the Galatasaray Offside goes on vacation

By: Musab | June 20th, 2009

Is he really leaving or not? That’s the question the CimBom fans have when it comes to Servet Cetin. Seemingly concrete reports are coming out now that Galatasaray have accepted a 8.5 million Euro offer from Marseille for arguably the best Turkish central defender, Servet Cetin. Servet’s physical strength and height along with his great marking abilities make him one of the stars of this squad. After arriving from Sivasspor for $500,000 two seasons ago, to see a 8 million Euro profit come out of it would be fantastic.

However is this deal right for Galatasaray? It sure is a lot of money but we will need another player to take over Servet’s place. I don’t like the idea of selling players that we need, unless we can find someone to fill in his place. If Servet leaves, that means we will need to sign TWO central defenders. If we imagine that we buy a Turkish defender from one of the Anatolian teams, that can cost an even million for say Ediz from Ankaraspor. We then have 7 million to use as we like.

There is also the issue of what to do with all the surplus players. Umit Karan, Necati Ates, Mehmet Guven, Volkan Yaman, and Shabani Nonda don’t seem to have a place in this team anymore (you could add more). However there wages are pretty sizeable with around 6-7 million dollars a year being spent on these players. Cutting them off will open up that cash that we can use as well. However with few buyers on the market, the board have a serious problem on their hands.

This post will be the last one for a month as I will be heading to Germany until the end of July on a University program in the city of Kassel. I plan to visit other European cities as well during my stay so I will be pretty much always on the move. However I do plan on visting Galatasaray’s summer training program in Bochum which runs from July 1-12 and plan to watch at least one of the exhibition matches against Bayer Leverkusen, Al Ahly, and Esperance. Hopefully I can get some great photos of the team and perhaps even snag some autographs.

Until try to catch some CimBom news of other sites or even Galatasaray’s official site galatasaray.org which does a pretty good job of keeping fans informed about the what’s going on at the club in Turkish, English, and French. Feel free to leave comments below to keep each other informed about CimBom news as well.