Ryan Mason has inherited a ‘hard to find’ player who West Brom have already discovered.
As the football-starved mind drifts over the summer, things can temporarily slip from your memory. Out of sight, out of mind as they say. For a number who follow West Bromwich Albion, seeing photos of Tammer Bany reporting to the club’s training ground for pre-season testing this week, their memories might’ve needed jogging.
Amid the winter furore, the dramatic acquisition of Adam Armstrong and the instant impact forged by Isaac Price, Bany’s introduction to life in England, to the Championship and to The Hawthorns was comparably subdued. He didn’t possess the goal record of Armstrong, or the familiarity of English football which Price had to lean on.
At 21, Bany had been tearing it up in the Danish Superliga for Randers, a club themselves only a little older than he is. They finished fourth last year, by the way, behind the likes of Copenhagen, Midtjylland and Brondby. That’s the company they’re keeping these days under manager Rasmus Bertelsen.
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Having signed for Randers from second division side B93 in January 2024, after they’d green lighted the record sale of Filip Bundgaard, Bany then broke his predecessor’s transfer fee when switching to Albion 12 months later, for a sum in excess of £3m.
“In the last day of the January window in 2024, we sold a player to Brondby, it was a record sale for Randers,” Bertelsen told BirminghamLive. “It came out of nowhere. Then, we needed to fill the gap and one of the players on our list was Tammer Bany, who was playing in the second division in Denmark.
“He was recognised as a good talent but also a player who hadn’t yet fulfilled his potential. We took a chance on him – we, Randers, aren’t a big club but it wasn’t a small transfer but it was a chance we were willing to take because we saw potential in Tammer. When he came, he went straight to Spain for our winter training camp, from the first minute you could see a player who had something special about him.”
We were privy to only glimpses of Bany in the second half of last season under Tony Mowbray. It’s important to note that he was having to get his fitness levels back up after unwinding during the Danish winter break, and then he encountered minor but frustrating injury setbacks which disrupted his efforts to build up a head of steam.
Mowbray saw raw ability and said as much about Bany from their time spent together on the training pitches, but he knew then that discipline and positioning were aspects of the diminutive Dane’s game which would have to be improved. That said, Mowbray had been impressed by Bany’s application and fearlessness, qualities Bertelsen agrees he possesses.
“He has an intensity in his game, both against the ball but also with the ball. He can play at a high level, maybe not for 90 minutes but for periods of the game he can be an outstanding player,” Bertelsen explained.
“You can see he’s grown up on the streets, a little bit, in terms of being tough in his duels. He knows how to shield the ball, even when bigger opponents are close to him. That intensity and smartness he has in his game, I think that helped him adapt to the Danish Superliga. He didn’t need many games to make an impact in our team.”
“Of course the Championship is a faster and more physical game with more athletic players. I think he has the skills but it’ll be a question of how they manage his body and his fitness – he’ll never be a guy who plays 90 minutes three times in a week. If you manage him well, then for sure he can make an impact.”
Was it at all a surprise, to Bertelsen, that Bany could have multiplied his transfer price-tag by 22 times in the space of a year?
“It was the third time we’d broken our transfer record – now Tammer has it,” he pointed out. “We weren’t surprised that someone had bought him that early, but West Brom did a good job in finding him. If you get him to his top level, he is a very special player.
“Of course, for a player who we had only just bought for €150,000, and then a year later he becomes the record sale, it was surprising but it’s the way football is going. Now, clubs are looking for players even younger than before, they look for opportunities to sell on and get the good business done. It was not something which was completely crazy, but of course it was surprising that it went so fast.”
Albion, of course have their own existing Scandinavian success story in the form of Torbjorn Heggem. The Norwegian, now a fully fledged international, signed from Swedish side Brommapojkarna last summer for comparative pennies and his own valuation will have skyrocketed in the intervening period since. It’s certainly a hotbed of Europe if you look closely enough.
“All three leagues – the Danish, the Swedish and the Norwegian leagues – there are a lot of big sales coming out of every transfer window these last few years,” Bertelsen pointed out. “It’s something we’ve been used to now.
“One of the reasons is because it’s very structured, the way they work with the talents in Scandinavia and how we try to give them a chance a little bit earlier, more so than the Championship or Premier League. Here, they can break into the teams at 17 or 18, develop and then come to the bigger leagues.”
As for Bany, who now has a substantial pre-season ahead of him under new boss Ryan Mason, having been granted time to settle into his new surroundings and bed into a new way of living, Bertelsen has been left in no doubt of the player’s ability and believes he has it in him to, like Heggem, make the jump onto the international stage in time, if the stars align.
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