Yes. Your long running opposition to anything WM (aside from his playing career) is very much in the same category. We get it.
I think he, the club, the manager and every other manager will almost always be negotiating from a position of weakness when a player does well in a season. It becomes progressively harder to keep a player when others want to pay them much more than we can afford. Of course there is the posturing from the club about "not getting fucked about" but they are hardly likely to say the opposite though are they, even when it's likely to be true?
This isn't something peculiar to just us at all. Just different scales.