Anzhi director says QPR were ‘out of their minds’ to splash out on Samba

Harry Redknapp and gambles in the transfer market goes hand in glove, but even by his standards the package to take Chris Samba to Loftus Road was risky.

By Declan Whooley

While most people were scratching their heads that the club would pay £12.5 million and offer £100,000 a week over four and a half years for the former Blackburn centre-half, it seems Anzi Makhachkala themselves couldn’t get over the offer made for their Congolese defender.

Director of the big-spending Russian club German Tkachenko said that the club wept – in a good way – when the offer came in and think that the London club were out of their minds to pay such sums in order to get the defender.

“At QPR he will earn almost as much as he did at Anzhi. In my view QPR have lost their minds,” he told Russian media.

“When they agreed to pay his release fee we wept. He [Samba] wept. Everybody says that he ran away from the club, but that's not true. He didn't put any pressure on the club until we received an offer from QPR for £12.5m, the amount required by his contract,” he added.

He did suggest that Samba is also one of the top five defenders in Europe, but maybe he sees qualities most others don’t.

Seven points adrift of safety, Samba will need to tighten up a porous defence very quickly or we will soon be looking at perhaps the highest earning player ever to feature in the Championship.