Both Sporting and Sebastian Coates make no suspense regarding the player’s future. The Portuguese club, who have the right to buy him from Sunderland for €5m, are always flirting to do so. And the defender constantly shows his desire to stay in Lisbon.
Coates, still owned by Sunderland, gave an interview to Sporting TV this Wednesday.
It was that type of chat where the player tells his story since the very beginning of his career, so he mentioned the hard time he had when leaving Nacional to join Liverpool in 2011: “It was a big change. I came from Nacional Montevideo, a big club in Uruguay but I felt the difference. The training, the facilities, it was all much different from what I knew. Maybe I wasn’t prepared of a change of this level. I took long to adapt and I hadn’t time for that.”
That’s why since moving from Sunderland to Sporting he feels a bit more familiar about the language: “It was hard in the beginning. When I went to England the culture was different, the language too. It was easier here in Portugal, in Uruguay we have Brazil very close, there are some similar words.”
Asked about his idols, the defender revealed he already played against one of them: “When I was a boy I watched Maldini, but when I started bring a defender, seriously watching defenders, there was John Terry at Chelsea. I’ve faced him, but never told him anything like that. He’s a reference for me.”
Finally on the chance of a permanent switch from Sunderland, he said: “Me and my family are happy here. Now it’s up to reaching an agreement and yeah, I hope to stay”.
Coates was loaned from Sunderland to Sporting in January 2016, in a deal which runs until the next summer. The Portuguese club already had the right to buy him permanently last year, but have been delaying the decision until the end of the spell.
