Coming as a shock to a lot of people on Monday night, Crystal Palace made a €38m (£31m) offer for Michy Batshuayi, which was accepted, as reported by L’Equipe.
What hasn’t come as a shock is news on Tuesday the player appears to have declined the offer made by the Premier League club, preferring to wait for other options.
Now call us cynics if you wish, but this stinks of Marseille making this news public in order to let the world know how much they are willing to sell their star striker for, and it seems to have worked.
Since this news emerged, articles have started flying around that Tottenham have redoubled their efforts to sign the Belgian international, who scored two minutes after coming on against Hungary.
Forced into acting early by their London neighbours, Tottenham will allegedly make a very similar offer to Palace’s, with the player far more interested in Mauricio Pochettino’s project than Alan Pardew’s.
The French website even go as far as saying Batshuayi could earn up to £100k/week at Tottenham were the deal to go through.
That seems like a lot, but he’ll certainly get a nice pay rise if/when he moves to England, his priority destination.
Fully expecting this story to speed up now, especially after Marseille made promises to the DNCG (LFP’s financial regulatory system) players would be sold soon to balance the books.