“I would have liked to have Romain Hamouma when he was younger. He stinks of football. He feels the combinations, he lets go of the ball when necessary, he’s a footballer, it’s extraordinary! I would have liked to see him in teams with players around him who feel the game in the same way ”: in an interview with So Foot, last month, Claude Puel had been particularly laudatory towards Romain Hamouma, a player in who he gave the captain’s armband several times this fall in the absence of Mathieu Debuchy. However, the striker is at the end of his contract and while he is free to engage with the club of his choice since the opening of the Mercato, on January 2, ASSE does not seem determined to extend it.
He asks for two more years
At the start of the season, the leaders had made a proposal to the player but he had declined. It was a one-year extension, conditioned by the number of matches played by the former Caen player in 2020-21. This is a way for the club to protect itself in the event of a player’s injury, long in delicacy with his calves but which is one of the few elements not to have visited the infirmary of L’Etrat since the start of the season.
Not about money
Concretely, Hamouma would have been automatically extended for one season if he had reached 25 matches this season. While some sources have argued in recent days that he was asking for a salary increase, the striker (33) simply asked for a new two-year lease, and to regain his salary from last season, which had fallen by 20 % this summer as he was entering his final year. But since then, n ° 21, who has never been among the 10 highest salaries of ASSE (his emoluments have never reached six figures and they are far from it today), no longer has any club news. He therefore heads for the exit. He who is, since the dismissal of Stéphane Ruffier, the last “survivor” of the winning workforce of the Coupe de la Ligue in 2013, with Jessy Moulin. A Mill who had seen his salary reassessed last summer, when he officially became No. 1. A salary even more distant from the big contracts of the club, let us specify it. By specifying also that we are talking about two players who are anything but mercenaries. And that we also talk, with Hamouma, again advised by his historical agent David Wantier, of ASSE’s top scorer in the 21st century (58 goals) and his current top scorer this season (4 goals).
