Signing Carlos Vinícius from Benfica on loan with a view to buy, Tottenham solved their big problem of backup for Harry Kane.
While there were players who could play there, Spurs didn’t have a second natural number nine, which led to a worldwide search.
In the end, it’s the Brazilian who was chosen, and only time will tell if they got the right profile for the job.
He wasn’t the only player looked at, as L’Equipe explain Moussa Dembélé, currently at Lyon, ‘could have left Lyon a good week or so before the end of the window’.
It’s said José Mourinho ‘ticked his name’ for him to be Kane’s backup, and had made him ‘one of his priorities’.
The problem was that Tottenham ‘wanted a loan’, which Lyon didn’t accept at the time as they still thought they’d be able to sell either Jeff Reine-Adélaïde, Houssem Aouar or Memphis Depay.
However, they did none of that and only managed to send the former of that trio on loan to Nice with a view to buy.
That showed their strategy had changed, but it was too late as Spurs had already signed Vinícius even if ‘it really was Dembélé that Mourinho wanted to attracted a few days earlier’.
