If it was known for weeks that the player wasn’t interested in joining Spurs. Why have they wasted time with a bid?
I imagine a couple of things - firstly there’s likely a difference between agreeing a deal in principle and making a formal bid/offer. Clubs (especially Spurs who hate bad PR and notably try and keep all these things under wraps) don’t like being rejected and even less so when that stuff gets leaked to social media by the transfer journos. Secondly Kounde knows he is in high demand and it would be mad for him not to wait a couple of weeks to see if a more lucrative offer from a CL club comes in, if he truly wants to leave. He was in France’s Euros squad so is probably still on holiday, so you’d imagine he’ll decide before starting preseason. Edit: Thirdly, and even more pertinent right now given the financial situation many clubs find themselves in. If you’re negotiating for multiple targets at once, as we are informed Paratici is wont to do, then Club X knowing we’re also strongly considering a player in the same position from Club Y is a useful negotiation card to hold when hammering out the final details.
I get all that, but by all accounts Kounde would rather stay at Sevilla than join Spurs so surely that should have been a quick enquiry and then moved on to a realistic target as it’s seemed quite clear he’s not interested at all.
For sure, but to be fair it sounds like we’re doing that, with Tomiyasu from Bologna being reported as pretty close, and our old flame Skriniar namechecked as our next port of call after Kounde. No doubt there are others as well.
According tot he usual suspects with hourly quotas to fill, Kounde's turned us down as he's expecting bids from elsewhere so isn't willing to commit Which puts us in a particularly irritating position: do we keep tabs on him until he decides "You'll do" because the offers he was expecting didn't arrive, or do we move on to Skriniar/Lacroix/Andersen/Romero/whoever PDQ? Especially since, from the outset, Kounde has always felt like a saga waiting to happen This is why I think Vestergaard and Milenkovic are our fallback options, because both certainly have their positives but both also have a distinct feel of staying in our lane while Kounde, Skriniar and Lacroix all feel like actually pushing forwards It's also worth pointing out that we're probably a year late with an approach for Skriniar - which is doubly irritating as there's been rumours that Hitchen actually negotiated terms with him last summer, but Inter simply raised the price by £10m at the last minute and we broke off negotiations
Tomiyasu is all but done isn’t it? I’m assuming they will sell one of Dier/Toby/Sanchez so another CB is needed too.
Apparently so. As it is, Toby has said he wants to leave, and it looks like there might be more interest in Sanchez than Dier. I look forward to the mindfuck when Dier ends up staying So as it stands it’s Tomiyasu + 1 in, Toby + 1 out (if he gets his wish).
Sanchez would likely be a useful CB in both La Liga and the Bundesliga so I can understand why there would be more interest in him than Dier, who realistically only works in the Premier League and maybe Serie A In short, what we really need to do is sign some duff CBs we can dump off on Ligue 1 clubs in cash + player deals a year or two down the line
There’s now reports saying we’ve made a bid for Skriniar. Those rumours of Fabio making multiple offers for various players may actually be true. Here’s hoping not everyone rejects us though, lol.
Skrinrar and the such like have got a tough decision to make 3rd tier Euro cup or CL For the blind, this is us suffering from previous years of average mindset...culminating in a decline on the pitch. This is how the short term affects the long term. Lesson 1 for the Levystas in the art of 'accumulating to speculate' otherwise Tier 3 of European talent is where we will be shopping.
Inter are seriously skint and will be looking to push some big players out the door so I guess the Skriniar stuff depends on who else comes in. I get nervous when we spend big though as I feel like our track record hasn’t been that good when breaking/approaching our record fees. Our sweet spots over the years have been the Vertonghens, Hojbjergs of the world - early-mid 20s players who we feel can step up. Obviously inflation in the market means you don’t just snap up the title winning captain of Ajax for 12m Euros any more but still.
IIRC correctly he is going into the last year of his contract so that should hopefully push the price down. In fact there are quite a few pretty decent players across Europe who all seem to have entered their final year simultaneously, Mbappe being the highest profile of them (although rumour has it he intends to play out his last year and leave for free next summer, which is awfully nice of him as we're a bit strapped for cash). Wouldn't be surprised if Covid's financial impact has inhibited clubs' ability to do what was once a formality in tying their players down to a new and bigger deal.
A chunk of it can be pinned on the period around 2016-17 where we had the attitude that our first team was great so didn't need much tinkering with For the most obvious example, in the summer of 2017 we could've snapped up Andrew Robertson for £8m, but instead had the mindset that Danny Rose was in the form of his life so needn't look for another attacking LB even though Rose was recovering from knee surgery that summer - and when Rose returned he never came close to the form he had pre-injury It has to be said that a lot of our business at that time was looking for depth signings like Janssen, Gazzaniga and Nkoudou or longterm prospects like Foyth, when we should have been looking to tweak areas of the team considering both Dembele and Lamela were already missing a considerable chunk of games through injury, while Harry Maguire was available for £12m and would have been a better shout than gambling big on Sanchez or playing the long game with Foyth
I can’t see him wanting to leave Inter for Spurs, two things attract players and atm Spurs can’t realistically offer either
As I said earlier, I think we're a year late with Skriniar And that's the problem: according to some second (or, likely, third)-hand accounts doing the rounds, Hitchen had agreed terms with Skriniar last summer but Inter either raised the price at the last minute or simply set it too high and never intended on budging Add to that the lack of wriggle room as he has two years on his contract so they have a few bargaining chips of their own, I doubt we'll get a deal as sweet as the one we agreed with Sevilla for Kounde to say "Well if nobody else comes along, I suppose you'll do" unless we somehow convince Inter that Dier's worth £15-20m
