Remember the Name - Omar Richards

I suspect very few people outside of Reading have heard of Omar Richards, but it would seem that important people in Bavaria have. The Left Back of my beloved Reading has apparently signed a pre-contract with European super club Bayern Munich, seeing him move to the German giants this summer for nothing. Zip. Nadda. Not a penny. Not even a bag of footballs.

With transfermarkt valuing the player at £4.5m, that's a lot of money for Reading to be missing out on at a time when the money would come in very handy indeed. And that's the problem Reading face - to have kept this player and sold him for a fee, we'd have had to tie Omar up into a new contract with finances that at the moment, Reading simply don't have. If we don't get promotion this season, we could be in trouble with Financial Fair Play regulations and so we must let a talented youngster leave.

Which I must say is a real shame as Reading did a good job in developing a player that was released by Fulham and taken into our youth academy at the age of 16 (he's now 23), making his debut one year later (under the utterly inept management of Jaap Stam). It was only once current manager Veljko Paunovic joined the club that Omar started to significantly improve and is now approaching 100 games for us.

So what can Munich expect? I think the one thing that stands out for me is his attacking ability - he was an attacking forward when he joined us that then converted into a full back so in a team like Munich, he could thrive. I've heard that the contract offered guarantees him 1st team football which would be quite an achievement. Reading to Bayern Munich, it'll be a first.

It'll be interesting to see what happens here as he's never stood out to me as an exceptional player but time will tell. Another young(ish) English player has moved to Germany in the hope of making a name for himself and breaking into the England squad.

If it's true of course. It's been widely reported for weeks now but neither club has confirmed the news. We'll just have to wait and see...

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