Loaned to Aston Villa for the first half of the season, Axel Tuanzebe was hoping to get the minutes he wouldn’t be given at Manchester United.
This all happened when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was still in charge at Old Trafford and Dean Smith was in charge in the Midlands, but once Steven Gerrard took over, it all changed.
While Tuanzebe was playing occasionally at the start of the season, he barely featured under the Liverpool legend, and with Manchester United perhaps warned that this wouldn’t improve, they called him back.
Over in Italy, Napoli were keen to bring in the centre-back on loan, which was swiftly organised, but that hasn’t gone to plan either.
Gazzetta dello Sport cover the former England U21 international’s situation on Tuesday, and explain he is still ‘blocked by back pain’, which has kept him out of action since the end of January.
He’s currently ‘following a personalised training program’, which he has done for over a month, and remains unavailable to Luciano Spalletti.
That’s why, ‘under these conditions, it is difficult to imagine Napoli can move to keep him’.
The Serie A side didn’t agree a future fee with Manchester United, which was something they were planning on doing at the end of the season, ‘but there are really too many doubts about the physical strength of the player’.
The hope was they could emulate what Milan achieved with Fikayo Tomori, but ‘this was not the case, and for this reason, further evaluations will be carried out’ between now and the end of the season.
