For a while, it appeared that Wolverhampton Wanderers could end up signing Faouzi Ghoulam on a free.
The defender wanted to leave Napoli, the Serie A club wanted to get rid of him and Jorge Mendes was called in to try and get something sorted.
The idea was for him to cancel his contract with Napoli and end up waltzing his way over to Molineux, but that doesn’t look likely to happen now.
This is what La Repubblica are claiming on Thursday, explaining the Algerian ‘continues to be a foreign body and needs a change of scenery, but his wages of €3.5m make him difficult to sell’.
As for Wolverhampton in all this, it’s explained the path leading Ghoulam to Nuno EspirÃto Santo’s side ‘has complicated itself’, and there’s a ‘risk’ he could remain in Naples.
That’s not ideal, but it could be that Marçal was bought in in his stead, and that once the Brazilian was secured, Wolves simply moved on from the former Saint-Etienne star, hence the so called complications’.
