Leicester City have to take transfer action over £90k-a-week player - they can save a fortune | OneFootball

With financial pressures building and interest in Harry Winks known, moving him on may be a decision that Leicester City can't afford to not take.

Leicester City's financial position is such that they can't afford Premier League wages in the Championship, so interest in Harry Winks should be of interest to them.

With a 2-1 win against Sheffield Wednesday on the opening weekend of the Championship season, Leicester City got off to a reasonable start to their attempt to find a way back to the Premier League following last season's abject relegation. But there remain plenty of potential bumps in the road ahead for them.

Leicester seem almost certain to face a points deduction this season over previous PSR breaches, though at present no-one knows when this will be announced or how big the deduction will be. But the very fact that they're in this pickle in the first place speaks volumes. This is a club that needs to cut costs, as a matter of the utmost importance.

Leicester have six of the ten highest-paid players in the Championship - Harry Winks is the top earners

The most obvious way in which the club can cut costs is through trimming their wage budget. And Leicester's costs are high. According to Capology estimates, six of the ten best players in the entire division play for them.

One of the players near the very top of that list is Harry Winks.

He's estimated to be on £90,000-a-week, the second-highest paid player in the division. And there is interest in him, as per Mike McGrath of the Daily Telegraph, from Spain, Italy and England, with Valencia, Fiorentina and Brentford all reported to be tracking him.

Harry Winks may be a luxury that Leicester City simply cannot afford

It is entirely understandable that Leicester City wouldn't want to lose the services of Harry Winks. He is an exceptionally talented player, ten times capped by the England national team. He made over 200 appearances for Tottenham Hotspur before signing for Leicester in 2023. He played in a Spurs team that finished as runners-up in the Premier League in 2017, and started for them in the Champions League final two years later.

But in the Championship, this calibre of player feels like a luxury that a club should only be paying for if they can afford it, and what we know for sure about Leicester City is that they've been living beyond their financial means for a while. From an entirely practical point of view, if there are clubs who would take him on, now might be the perfect time to offload him.

Winks only has a year left on his contract, so any transfer fee payable could be fairly modest. And of course, the player himself would have to be open to the move. But there is evidence to suggest that he wouldn't be averse to moving abroad; he spent the 2022-23 season on loan at Sampdoria before signing for Leicester the following summer.

At 29-years-old, Winks still has several years ahead of him, and a move elsewhere might be good for him, too. Of course, there would be questions to ask about his wage requirements, but those aren't Leicester's problem; that's a conversation to be had between the player and any prospective club who firms up their reported interest in him.

But moving club doesn't have to be all about money for the player. Being in a top-flight division, whether in Spain, Italy or England, would give him an opportunity to revive his international career when he hasn't played for his national team since November 2020. There are plenty of reasons why he might want a new challenge, especially after what was a pretty disastrous season at The King Power Stadium, last time around.

There's a lot of money at stake. There are 46 weeks until the 1st July next year, and that amounts to over £4 million that the club could save by moving him on, and that's before any transfer fee they receive is taken into account. And tempting though it might be for Leicester to persuade themselves that this is a player that they simply cannot do without, the question they might be better off asking themselves is whether they can afford not to move him on, should the opportunity present itself.