Even without the benefit of hindsight, sending Joselu to Deportivo La Coruna perhaps wasn’t the best idea Stoke City ever had. If it was the only loan option available for Joselu then Stoke may have been left with no other choice, but that’s got to be unlikely.
Deportivo La Coruna don’t pay big loan fees, and often don’t even cover a player’s wages, so the odds were already stacked in the Spanish club’s favour. Added to that was an instant hate towards Joselu, the Stoke owned player having come through the ranks at Depor’s enemy Celta Vigo.
The loan spell was hampered by injury, but even without that it would have been unlikely for Depor to offer anything approaching a reasonable fee to make the transfer permanent.
Fortunately for Stoke, there’s other interest, but that also comes with the money problem. Marca report that Malaga are keen, as they look for a replacement for Sandro 
Ramirez, but the transfer would be ‘complex’.
The reason for the complexities is money, with the Spanish newspaper pointing out that Stoke paid a relatively big fee to Hamburg in 2015. Marca believe that fee was €8m, and Stoke would be looking for a big chunk of it back.
Whilst that may not seem like an issue when English football finances are concerned, Malaga aren’t in the best financial position and they’d probably want to pay around half of that.
