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Hot Football Transfer Gossip: Man City ‘open talks’ with £40m Alaba, Inter ‘target Batshuayi’
Every manager has a least one player they always like to sign whenever they move to a new club. Neil Warnock loves Paddy Kenny. Harry Redknapp is obsessed with Niko Krancjar. Steve Bruce adores, erm, Alex Bruce.
But perhaps the most surprising thing about Pep Guardiola’s summer spending spree at Manchester City was that he didn’t sign a single one of his old players from Barcelona or Bayern Munich.
No Sergio Busquets, no Lionel Messi (well, that wasn’t surprising), not even any Thiago Alcantara. It was all a bit disappointing for the City fans who thought they might see Manuel Neuer follow Pep through the door.
But those fans need wait no longer. City aren’t signing Neuer (sorry), but they are about to snare his Bayern team-mate David Alaba.
That’s what the Sun says anyway. The tabloid reports that Pep has “opened talks” with the versatile Austrian over a £40m move.
Guardiola has reportedly “decided to replace his full-backs” at City after realising they aren’t very good at defending, and Alaba is the man he has identified to play on the left side of his backline.
The 24-year-old signed a new £75,000-a-week deal in March, but City are “willing to double it”. Of course they are - that’s what they do innit.
Across Manchester, Henrikh Mkhitaryan had a nice evening watching his first United-Liverpool match yesterday evening. At least we hope he enjoyed watching it, because he didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of playing in it.
The apparently amazing Armenian already appears to have been sidelined by Jose Mourninho, and the president of his former club Borussia Dortmund said the playmaker’s decision to move to Old Trafford was “strange”.
“Any intelligent player should consider in advance what kind of environment they are moving to,“ Hans-Joachim Watzke said in the Express, clearly implying that Mkhitaryan is not intelligent. Hopefully Henrikh figures that out.
Mkhitaryan is surely a rocket scientist compared to Inter striker Mauro Icardi though.
The fiery Argentine, who has been labelled a "clown” by his own club’s fans after he criticised them in his autobiography, could now be offloaded by the Nerazzurri. And the man they have lined up to replace him is Chelsea’s Michy Batshuayi, says Talksport.
Elsewhere, Sunderland are set to make a £31m move for FC Copenhagen’s Paraguayan striker Federico Santander (Goal), Barcelona are “eyeing up” Man Utd’s 16-year-old midfielder Angel Gomes (Mail) and Southampton are weighing up a move for Rennes forward Paul-Georges Ntep (Talksport). This truly is a golden age of double-barrelled Christian names in the French league.
