Approaching mid September, when failed transfer post-mortems were all the rage, Marca had a look at Andre Gomes’ situation, and how, they explained, he nearly ended up at Tottenham.
Barcelona’s wage bill has been running at 84% of the club’s turnover, and that was prior to Lionel Messi renewing. The club need to get that own, and already knew that in the summer, but failed to shred the squad of fringe players on big contracts.
Marca explained that despite Barcelona rejecting €45m from an unnamed club earlier in the summer window, the club tried to send him to Tottenham for ‘almost free’ as the market was closing.
The earlier €45m offer was always hard, maybe impossible, to believe, because Barcelona would surely have gift-wrapped the player for that amount.
So, even after Tottenham being able to sign him for ‘almost free’, on a loan basis, Mauricio Pochettino still didn’t go in seriously.
This time, there’s a red carpet being rolled out again, and whilst momentum is building in terms of who Barcelona want to sell, there doesn’t seem to be anything coming from Tottenham. More worryingly, there doesn’t seem to be anything coming from anywhere.
Tottenham had been thrown in with Juventus during the summer, with an insistence Pochettino was interested, but now there’s nothing from Spurs’ end, and even the Turin press have grown bored of Andre Gomes.
