Sporting Club de Portugal are continuing to insist that Arsenal, and other suitors, have not made an official bid for Viktor Gyökeres.
That’s according to journalist Bruno Andrade, via Mais Futebol, who reports that he’s been contacted officially by the Portuguese club to set the record straight.
Gyökeres’ future has become the hot topic in the early days of the transfer as he appears determined to leave Sporting this summer.
Arsenal are one of the clubs interested in him and a report this week stated that they had made the first move for the 27-year-old.
This was widely reported and detailed in Portugal, where the developing story, and the very public battle between Sporting, their president Federico Varandas, Gyökeres and his agent is headline news and dominating the agenda.
Andrade is one of the journalists in the middle of it, and was busy reporting on Arsenal’s offer this week as a result.
It seems, though, Sporting were left less than impressed by what he was saying and contacted him officially to put the record straight. That, he says, is something that doesn’t normally happen.
“It is a bureaucratic issue, it is a legal issue,” he told CNN Portugal.
“Obviously, yesterday when they confronted me, they said look, it is not a proposal, it is an initial approach.
“Even for the journalistic issue, I found it confusing why Sporting talks about the first approach officially, because I was contacted by an official source from Sporting to say exactly that.
“Clubs rarely contact me officially, almost always unofficially, but this time it was official. And when it comes to the issue of the first approach not being proposed, I found it strange. Initially I thought it was a mere semantic issue, but I have a flea in my ear due to a bureaucratic issue.”
