Sporting Lisbon are having a nightmare season and it’s getting to the stage that they’re ready to write it off and look ahead to the next campaign. Portuguese newspaper A Bola has a big feature on Thursday looking at the plans of president Bruno De Carvalho and manager Jorge Jesus, and the gist is: Make Sporting Great Again.
The plans will involve bringing players into the club, but that will also mean players will have to go. A Bola say Sporting know they need to get a financial ‘hit’ similar to last summer, a window which saw Islam Slimani sign for Leicester City and Joao Mario go to Inter Milan, for a claimed combined fee of €70m.
The two men picked out who could replicate that are Adrien Silva and William Carvalho, with A Bola believing they’re the most coveted, and therefore easiest to sell. That’s where West Brom and Leicester could come in.
Leicester City almost signed Adrien last summer, with claims of a possible double deal with Slimani. Adrien asked to leave Sporting be allowed to join Leicester, but the two clubs couldn’t agree on a fee.
West Brom seem to have been the only Premier League club to make a real attempt to sign Carvalho last summer, but that broke down too. Since then there have been all kinds of claims about Tony Pulis’ club still being interested in the player.
Sporting will almost certainly be selling big in the summer if they can. It’s not just that they need money to buy players, but they have an outstanding debt of around €20m with third party investment company Doyen, after they lost a CAS case over Marcos Rojo’s transfer.
Leicester City and West Brom could take advantage of the situation and go back for their targets of the last summer window.
