The Portuguese press had a pretty busy Tuesday night, after FIFA rejected Adrien Silva’s transfer from Sporting to Leicester City.
The local newspapers did a good job getting information from different sources on the case, as the midfielder’s future is still surrounded by smoke.
Leicester officially spoke to the Portuguese papers last night. Although Jornal de Notícias claims to have the exclusive quotes, all the outlets published it today, with the club saying: “We are working with Adrien and Sporting to overcome some issues related to player registration and explore all options to find a resolution.”
As reported by A Bola, it seems the transfer was registered only 11 seconds late. And even though the FA accepted Leicester’s request for extra time, FIFA did not.
Both Diário de Notícias and O Jogo interviewed Bernardo Morais Palmiero, who is a lawyer and previously worked for FIFA, to speak on the matter. He talked about all the possibilities Leicester still have.
“Adrien is a Leicester player, the deal is closed and nobody questions it,” Palmiero told Diário de Notícias.
“I don’t know if FIFA would accept it because it’s not foreseen in the regulations. The international certificate is still in Portugal, what Leicester would have to do is to ask FIFA for the certificate to go to England to be issued immediately, then, for example, to Turkey. But that would prevent him from representing Leicester this sporting season.”
Speaking to O Jogo, he said: “The decision was expectable and is passed through the committee of player status and appealable for TAD. The presentation of an appeal does not have suspensive effect, but precautionary measures may be requested.
“However, the examination shows that the requests for the application of those measures are invariably rejected, since the issue here is very factual: either the request wasn’t submitted or did not arrive on time. That way, the feature usually has a small chance of success.”
“The validation of the transfer is not automatic. When the system blocks, it enters an exception state. It’s necessary that the FA, at the request of the club, verifies what has happened and request the intervention of FIFA to validate the registration, providing justification. The request was probably not presented or was only made yesterday (Monday).”
Finally, Sporting president Bruno de Carvalho was more corteous than usual, and claims to be hoping that everything goes right for Adrien to move. Speaking to Sporting TV (via Record), he said: “Adrien has performed exceptionally well in this period and I hope that Leicester can – because there are appeal mechanisms – register a player with this quality, who deserves to be playing.
“Sometimes there are these troubles. We placed the documents on time; the information I have is that Leicester have put most of the documents on time, but that the last one has entered a few seconds after the deadline has expired. If they cannot count on him for now, make him fit in, for example, it happened to us with Bruno César and André Pinto. It’s important.”
