Today we finally got the news we had been expecting all summer. It’s been confirmed that Ross McCormack will be heading for Fulham, with the final fee being £11million.

Clearly Massimo Cellino has done well to extract such a large fee from the Cottagers, and it’s a reward for his persistence in trying to hang on to the player, after initially saying that he would only sell the captain to a club in the Premier League. Cellino turned down several offers from Fulham, starting with their original offer of £5million, forcing the West London mob to go ever higher to get their man.

The reported £11million fee makes McCormack the second most expensive Scottish footballer of all time (second only to James McCarthy's £13million move from Wigan to Everton last year) and this is also the biggest transfer between two English clubs outside the Premier League. The only downside is that Leeds have to pay 15 percent of the fee to his former club Cardiff, but we’re still left with a huge profit on the £350,000 we paid for him four years ago.

McCormack signed a new four-year contract at Elland Road only last summer, but seems to have had a change of heart 12 months later, as he wants to be able to play at the highest level and decided that he would stand a better chance of playing Premier League football if he went elsewhere. At the age of 27 he is now at the peak of his career, and doesn’t want to wait for a long rebuilding process before Leeds can challenge for promotion.

He told the Yorkshire Post in May “If the quotes from him [Cellino} are right and he’s said he doesn’t expect promotion next year, that’s not something us as players want to hear or hang around for. At the end of the day, you want to go up and be part of a promotion here. I don’t want another year like that. It’s no good being done and dusted by April.”

McCormack asked for a transfer on June 20 - the day after David Hockaday had been appointed as the head coach, and confirmed to Cellino that he wanted to leave when the two had a face-to-face meeting at the end of last month. So although Cellino wanted to keep McCormack , whom he had described as “playing for three players and carrying a club who would have been relegated without him”, the Italian decided he would let the player leave as long as the money was right.

What matters now is what Cellino intends to do with the money. I’ve said in previous articles that I think it’s a good deal for Leeds to get so much money for a player who had three average seasons at Leeds before he came good, so I’m happy we’ve done the deal. Here’s hoping that Cellino will now spend every penny of the cash in getting some new players to bring some much-needed quality into our squad.

Photo: Action Images

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