Gaston Ramirez has still not ended his spell at Southampton, after not going to Italy as expected but joining Middlesbrough, perhaps the least Italian of English towns or cities.
Gaston Ramirez is still a Saints player after Championship club Middlesbrough announced that he has joined them on loan for the rest of the season.
The details are like most loan moves unclear apart from the length, but it will probably mean that Saints are having to still pay a fair chunk of his rumoured £50-60k salary.
If he had moved to Italy and Bologna on a permanent deal then it would have meant that Saints would have had him completely off the wage bill, but that is not going to be the case now.
From Ramirez point of view it means that he can go on picking up a hefty salary right till the end of his contract in July, you can't blame the player for wanting to do this, yes it is disappointing that he was not ready to cut his losses, but to be blunt he did not put a gun to Nicola Cortese's head and force the ex Saints Chairman to offer him that exorbitant salary, so he is entitled to receive every penny from it.
Ramirez would have been lucky to have got £20k a week in Italy with his stock very low after his time at Saints and even at Hull where he made little impression, that being the case he would have had to take a pay cut of around £40k a week to join Bologna, in cash terms that is a little over a cool million pounds he would have been waving goodbye to.
So that is the starting point for what his move to Boro will cost Saints assuming that the North East club are paying around £20k a week of his wages probably without having to pay a loan fee as well, but when you add National Insurance, Pension Contributions and loyalty bonus's to the mix, it could mean that Saints will lose somewhere between £1.5-2 million from Ramirez choosing a loan deal than if he had gone on a permanent move.
Whichever way Ramirez signing has been an expensive folly tht has cost the club somewhere around £30 million when you tot up transfer fee, wages, bonus's and all the peripherals, in other words more than half the money Saints would have received in that first season back in the Premier League.
Unlike that other Marque signing though, Ramirez has been a victim of circumstance rather than the architect of his own problems, from his earliest games it was clear that he was a play maker and a player who could thread a through ball into the channels, the problem with that was that Saints were playing to a certain style dictated to the manager by Cortese and Les Reed, that meant that the lone striker was Rickie Lambert and he was not a player that thrived on running on to passes and through balls.
That meant that Ramirez's talents were wasted, he either had to keep playing short balls or see inventive though passes wasted, that being the case Steven Davis could play a short ball as well as Ramirez and could run faster and tackle as well.
So it is a shame that we have not got shot of Ramirez or his wages just yet, but let's not blame Gaston, lets look at the circumstances that brought him to the club in what was pure folly.