Alex Scott has already said no once this year, and Bournemouth do not appear to be taking the hint. The 23 year old midfielder turned down a contract offer that would have made him the highest paid player in the club’s history, and rather than accept that answer and move on, owner Bill Foley has gone public with his determination to try again.
Foley told talkSPORT he wants Scott to sign a new deal and commit to the club for the long term, while also admitting he understood why a player in Scott’s position might have his head turned elsewhere. “We’d love to have Alex stay here and sign a new contract,” he said, before acknowledging the pull of bigger clubs. “Sometimes players get stars in their eyes and they think that Chelsea or Manchester City is the right place to go.” It is an unusually candid admission for an owner to make publicly, and it tells you plenty about how seriously Bournemouth are treating the prospect of losing him.
A second, club record offer is now being prepared, with Foley said to have specifically requested the approach after a recent visit to England. Scott’s current deal runs until 2028, so there is no desperate urgency written into the contract itself, but Bournemouth know a player of his quality rarely stays patient for long once bigger clubs start calling, and right now, several of them are.
A reluctant seller with a price in mind
Despite the public insistence that Scott is not for sale, Bournemouth have quietly set out what it would take to change their minds. Reports suggest the club would need an offer in excess of £100m before they would even consider letting him go, a figure that reflects both his importance to Marco Rose’s side and the market Bournemouth operate in, where developing and selling players well is central to how the club survives and competes in the Premier League.
Chelsea were the first of the bigger clubs to test that resolve, having an opening bid rejected over the summer. According to Fabrizio Romano, the London club have stayed in regular contact with Scott’s representatives since, with their admiration for the player described as genuine rather than opportunistic. Chelsea are understood to be readying another approach before the January window opens, sensing that patience may eventually be rewarded.
Arsenal and Tottenham have also held conversations about Scott, according to reports, circling without yet making their intentions as concrete as Chelsea’s. Both clubs have a recent history of being linked with Bournemouth’s academy graduates and first team regulars, and Scott’s versatility in midfield, combined with his England pedigree, makes him an obvious fit for either side’s long term planning.
Liverpool’s position is harder to pin down. Romano reported in the middle of October that the Merseyside club had made calls over the summer without ever submitting a formal offer, suggesting their focus had shifted towards Monaco’s Lamine Camara instead. Yet within days, separate reporting suggested Andoni Iraola, who managed Scott at Bournemouth before taking the Liverpool job, remains keen for his old club to sell to his new one. Those two positions are not easily reconciled, and until Liverpool show their hand more clearly, it is safest to treat their interest as real but unresolved rather than advanced.
An injury complicating the picture
Scott’s immediate football is currently on hold rather than under discussion. He is sidelined with a thigh injury that is expected to keep him out until after the November international break, a frustrating setback for a player who had made himself one of the first names on Rose’s team sheet and forced his way into Thomas Tuchel’s England squad earlier this year.
It also means the contract conversation is happening away from the pitch, at a time when Scott cannot simply let his performances do the talking. Bournemouth would understandably prefer to resolve his future before he returns, rather than have the speculation follow him back into the side just as their head coach is trying to build on an encouraging start to the season.
Rose himself is understood to have asked the Bournemouth hierarchy not to sell any of his key players in January, a request that will be tested if one of Europe’s bigger clubs decides £100m is a price worth paying midway through the season. Marcus Tavernier, Rayan and Adrien Truffert are among the other Bournemouth players reported to be attracting attention, but none carry quite the same weight of suitors as Scott.
A decision that will not wait forever
None of this means a transfer is close, and nothing reported so far should be read as anything more advanced than contact and interest. Bournemouth’s preference remains to keep him, Foley’s comments make that much obvious, and Scott himself has given no public indication that he is pushing for an exit. But a player who has already turned down a club record contract once is not someone who can be talked round indefinitely, and the longer this goes unresolved, the more it will hang over Bournemouth’s season.
For a club that has built its recent Premier League stability on recruiting shrewdly and selling well when the time is right, this is as much a test of Bournemouth’s own planning as it is of Scott’s ambition. Keep him and build around him, and there is a strong platform for continued progress. Lose him in January for the fee they are holding out for, and there would at least be the consolation of having done the business on their own terms. What they cannot really afford is to drift into the new year with the situation still unresolved and the player still unsettled.
Scott will have the final say, as he always does, and for now that answer remains no. Whether it stays that way once a second record contract lands in front of him, with four Premier League clubs watching from a distance, is the question Bournemouth are trying hard not to have to find out.
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