Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve covered a couple of articles looking at how well Erik Lamela has started life at Sevilla since his transfer from Tottenham in the summer.
The Argentine was sent to the La Liga side with Bryan Gil heading to London, and while the 20-year-old has had what many would call a tentative start to life in the Premier League, the same cannot be said for his counterpart in Spain.
The 29-year-old has three goals and an assist in six league games, of which he has started just two, and is currently being lauded as potentially the transfer of the summer in some corners of the press.
Estadio Deportivo are one of those, and they write a rather dramatic article on the matter headlined: ‘Hands up, this is a robbery!’.
As you might have guessed, it’s all about how Monchi, the man who put together the transfer for Sevilla, basically fleeced Spurs.
They kick off by explaining that the deal ‘is on the way to becoming a real robbery’, and they fantasise that the director of football must have said something along the lines of ‘Hands, up, this is a robbery!’ when he ‘sat down to negotiate with Tottenham last summer in a complex operation in which Bryan Gil was the cornerstone’.
While some originally thought the transfer wasn’t a good deal for Sevilla, they have been convinced otherwise now, with the negotiations now labelled as ‘outstanding’ by Estate Deportivo.
After all, Monchi not only did he sell ‘a substitute in the eyes of Lopetegui for some €25m’, allowing the club to ‘accelerate sports planning that was paralysed by the immobility of the market’, but he also ‘added to the squad a good resource that arrived for free and that, at least, would start with the same substitute label as Bryan Gil’.
It’s then pointed out that Monchi has long been an admirer of Lamela, trying to sign him when he was 12 years old, ‘discovered by Sevilla during a tournament that River’s children played in Galicia’.
His family rejected it, however, also ‘turning a deaf ear to Barcelona’, deciding to let him grow up in Argentina instead, but ‘years later, at the age of 19, he would end up crossing the pond to Rome in 2011’.
From that point onward, ‘Monchi would never take his eye off him’ and now, he’s finally got him.
