Only to save face when the other club won't pay. The alternative is to say 'no' and keep the player. I don't know why you're all so bewitched by the magical phrase 'add-ons'. For the last time: with settled first teamers rated at a high price, you're not really buying potential (you hope a player gets better and better, but you don't just buy raw potential), you're not in any real doubt how many games they'll play or any other such nonsense. So if you genuinely want to pay the extra money, you pay it. If a club came in for, say, Ibe, or Ryan Kent, we'd demand masses of add-ons because WE expect those players to go on to great things, but we can't prove it now, so we seek to make money when they realise their full potential for another club. All add-ons are when the player is already an international and a settled first teamer are chimerical gestures. It shuts the other club up and finally clinches a deal. Neither club expects any of them to be activated. It's so the buying club can wink at its friends and say, 'we really paid the minimum,' and the selling club can put out briefings that it got, 'in principle,' the maximum. Wakey wakey.
