RDT leaves Espanyol through the back door and signs for Rayo Vallecano

BarcelonaRaúl de Tomás is very close to becoming a new player for Rayo Vallecano. The Madrid striker has signed his exit this Monday through the back door of Espanyol. Sources from the white-and-blue entity assure ARA that the negotiations are very advanced, but not yet closed. The officiality of the agreement, however, could arrive in the next few hours. RDT has been in Madrid for a week negotiating his return to Vallecas and will only return to Barcelona to collect his belongings. The striker will immediately join Rayo’s training schedule, but will not be able to play an official game with his former team until January, when the deadline to register new players in the League will reopen.

In the noble offices of Cornellà-El Prat, they assume that this sale represents a lost opportunity: to turn RDT into the highest sale in the history of Espanyol. This was Chen Yansheng’s prediction, a few months ago now. The president and owner of Espanyol was confident of being able to generate a significant capital gain this summer for the most valuable asset of the squad. No club, however, wanted to take on the nearly 40 million euros that the Spanish club was asking for his transfer.

The close to 11 million that Espanyol will finally end up paying (about eight fixed plus three in variables) will barely serve to cover the pending amortization of the last three years of the contract that the striker had signed. RDT leaves Espanyol for a little less than half the money it cost (22.5 million). The Spanish entity will save the proportional part of the salary for this course. RDT’s was the highest bill of the workforce (about 4.2 million euros gross per year).

A complicated character

Espanyol’s top officials understand that they have been forced to facilitate the departure of RDT for a much lower price than they were asking for a few months ago in order to take care of the health of the dressing room. The striker communicated at the beginning of the summer his desire to leave a club where he considered that he had completed a stage, but the situation became untenable after the striker rejected the various offers made to him from the coaching staff to participate in various activities with the group. Time and again the tip justified suffering some discomfort in the adductor.

An attitude that surprised his former colleagues in the dressing room, who did not understand how RDT repeatedly refused to lend a helping hand to a squad that was short of cash in the middle of pre-season. Inside the Espanyol staff, they do not understand how a player who had won the admiration of the fans has decided to throw overboard all the credit earned in two and a half years at Cornellà-El Prat. “He’s not a bad guy, but he’s sorry he decided to leave like that when he could have done it like a hero,” they lamented from inside the dressing room. A complicated character that Rufete and Vicente Moreno tried to moderate in the summer of 2020, once relegation to Segona was confirmed. He tried to leave again this summer, but the conditions demanded by both Espanyol and the player thwarted any deal before the close of the market. The character of the player has played against him when it comes to negotiating his exit. “The clubs talk to each other, in the end everything is known”, explains a source who has intervened in the management of his case. Only Rayo, where he has a personal relationship with Martín Presa, a manager who ended up fighting and denouncing one of the player’s agents, decided to present a formal offer.

RDT’s case contrasts with that of his predecessor, a Borja Iglesias who had no problems helping the team through the first preliminary qualifiers of the Europa League while negotiating his exit from Betis. The Panda went out for 28 million, 1.4 of which went to Celta. It remains, three years later, the most abundant sale in the history of Espanyol, which earned 16.6 million with the sale of the Galician striker. A year earlier, in the summer of 2018, the white-and-blue entity had sold Gerard Moreno for 20 million to Villarreal, 18.5 more than Espanyol had paid him to the same club in 2015. Until all Dani Osvaldo (bought for 4.6 million in 2010 and sold for 16 in 2011), generated a capital gain of 11.4 million at Espanyol. The bad deal made with RDT, a historic opportunity lost by Espanyol.