Earlier this morning, we covered an ‘exclusive’ from Calciomercato.it about a new Southampton bid for Napoli’s Manolo Gabbiadini, with a ‘draft’ agreement being ‘reached’ between the two sides.
However, negotiations were reportedly still ongoing, as Napoli hadn’t officially accepted the Saints’ offer, and Il Mattino on Thursday have potentially revealed the reasons why.
The Serie A club are said to want €17.5m + bonuses, which isn’t far off what Southampton have offered, yet it’s the additional money that is really causing a problem.
The bonuses the Saints have offered are reportedly rather difficult to trigger, something Napoli aren’t particularly happy about, wanting the money for their player as quickly as possible.
As we’ve been saying all along, while the reporting of the bids has been all over the place by the Italian media, the general feeling is that the closer we get to the end of the transfer window, the more Aurelio de Laurentiis will be willing to negotiate a lower fee.
We’re already seeing glimpses of this, and it wouldn’t surprise us if a deal was struck in the final days of the transfer window.
Napoli know keeping Gabbiadini until the end of the season would only cause more unrest, having signed Leonardo Pavoletti from Genoa, and with Arkadiusz Milik soon returning from injury, offloading the former Sampdoria forward makes the most sense.
