As reported by The Daily Mail, Leeds United are looking to step up their quest to replace Charlie Taylor with a move for Manchester United youngster Cameron Borthwick-Jackson.
What’s the story?
After Taylor’s exit to Burnley this summer, Leeds need to shore up the left hand side of defence and it appears they’ve settled one man to do the job.
The Daily Mail reckon Leeds are hunting Manchester United’s young star Cameron Borthwick-Jackson, a player who has thus far failed to make the grade at Old Trafford.
The paper say Leeds are looking to bring him to Elland Road on a permanent basis after he spent last season on loan at Wolverhampton Wanderers. He is currently valued at £2.55m by Transfermarkt.
Does he have potential?
Despite not convincing Jose Mourinho that he could compete for first-team places at Manchester United, Borthwick-Jackson does have some match experience with Red Devils, making 14 appearances in the 2015/16 season.
He was named the club’s U21 Player Of The Year in 2016, highlighting that he has lots of potential if he can find the right home to show of his skills.
A permanent move to Leeds and a fresh start could be just what he needs to bring his game to the next level and in the long-term could prove to be a shrewd acquisition.
As reported by The Sun, Newcastle are set to rival Deportivo la Coruna for the signature of Arsenal forward Lucas Perez this summer.
Rafa Benitez is on the hunt for talent that can make the Magpies a real force in the top-flight next season after their promotion from the top-flight. It’s a difficult process in a busy market but someone like Lucas Perez certainly appears to fit the bill.
Despite not forcing his way into Arsene Wenger’s plans at the Gunners, he has good pedigree in La Liga, scoring 17 goals in the Spanish top-flight two seasons ago before his switch to London. If Benitez can tap into that kind of form they would have a real gem on their hands.
He made most of appearances for Arsenal from the bench last season but still managed to net 7 goals in all competitions, not an unsubstantial total given his minutes on the pitch.
It’s a signing that certainly appears to have caught the imagination of the Newcastle support with many fans taking to Twitter to share their enthusiasm about the potential switch…
According to Sky Sports, Tottenham Hotspur are one of a number of clubs interested in signing Leicester City winger Demarai Gray, although the Foxes are adamant he won’t be leaving after talks over his future.
What’s the word, then?
Well, Sky Sports says that the England Under-21 international has spoken to the east Midlands outfit about potentially moving on after becoming frustrated at a lack of first team opportunities.
Spurs, Everton and Borussia Dortmund are all credited with an interested in the wide-man by Sky Sports, but the report adds that Leicester have told Gray that he is not for sale with his current contract due to run out in 2020.
How did Gray do last season?
While he did make 42 appearances in all competitions for the Foxes – scoring two goals and providing a further five assists – the majority of those outings came from the substitutes’ bench and the 21-year-old made just nine Premier League starts.
The England Under-21 international – who scored twice for his country at the European Under-21 Championships earlier this summer – often saw Riyad Mahrez and Marc Albrighton preferred on the wings as Leicester struggled the season after they won the title.
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Would he be a good signing for Tottenham?
He certainly could be, yes.
We have seen with the likes of Dele Alli and Harry Winks that Spurs boss Mauricio Pochettino isn’t afraid to blood and develop younger players if he feels they are good enough, and the same would apply to Gray if he moved to the north London outfit this summer.
The 21-year-old has certainly shown glimpses of brilliance during his 18 months with the Foxes, including an outstanding strike against Manchester United at Old Trafford last term.
Tottenham are also potentially short in wide areas going into the new season with Erik Lamela and Son Heung-Min both set to be missing after hip and arm surgeries respectively.
What’s the verdict, then?
Well, with rumours over the future of Mahrez there could be more first team opportunities for Gray at Leicester next season, and that could mean it is difficult for Tottenham to prise the 21-year-old away unless they are willing to pay a significant fee for the winger.
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has claimed that he does not need to sign another centre-back in this window, reports the Liverpool Echo.
What’s the word?
The Merseyside outfit have brought in three new signings this summer so far, strengthening the full-back positions and the team’s attacking threat.
Andrew Robertson, Mohamed Salah and Dominic Solanke have all moved to Anfield, but this window for Liverpool seems to be more about the ones that got away rather than the new arrivals.
The Reds have been long linked to RB Leipzig star Naby Keita, but the Bundesliga club have stated numerous times that he is not for sale.
The saga of Liverpool’s summer, though, seems to be the pursuit of Southampton defender Virgil van Dijk.
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The Daily Star claims that Anfield is the Dutchman’s preferred destination, but the Saints are not prepared to play ball after accusing their rivals of tapping up the player.
Klopp has suggested that a deal is unlikely to be struck by claiming that he does not need another defender.
The German coach believes that Dejan Lovren, Joel Matip, Ragnar Klavan and Joe Gomez are good enough options.
The Liverpool Echo quotes Klopp as saying:
“We have four [centre-backs]. I don’t think we need more. In the moment I’m fine. We are open until the 31st [of August]. We cannot force the things and we would never get a centre-back just because.
“We have the need, we have some but you don’t take any. It doesn’t work. Look out there and tell me five that would make us stronger, five. Then you win a prize! It’s difficult how it is. I’m happy.”
Are Liverpool’s current defenders good enough?
If the Merseyside outfit want to have a chance of winning the Premier League title this season, then they need to bolster the defence.
Liverpool have shown time and again that they are not strong enough at the back.
Matip and Lovren showed glimpses of a decent partnership last season, but consistency was lacking.
Liverpool need an established and strong leader in the back line, and they would certainly be getting that with Van Dijk.
The Reds can be scintillating going forward when Sadio Mane, Philippe Coutinho and Roberto Firmino are in their best form, but the defence is the club’s Achilles heel.
Klopp is a fantastic manager and proven winner, but he would be naive to truly think that his team do not need another centre-back.
It has been an eventful few days at West Ham United, but not for good reasons.
The Premier League club are in dispute with Sporting Lisbon over William Carvalho, who was linked with a move to the London Stadium during the summer transfer window.
Sporting’s communications director Nuno Saraiva denied claims from West Ham co-owner David Sullivan that a club-record bid was made in an attempt to sign Carvalho.
Saraiva described the businessman as a “parasite” in a lengthy Facebook post insisting that Sporting did not receive any bids from the Hammers.
Sporting president Bruno de Carvalho also got involved in the war of words, being quoted by Portuguese publication Record as describing West Ham co-owners Sullivan and David Gold the “dildo brothers”.
It appears that his comment is in reference to Sullivan’s previous work in the adult entertainment industry.
Now, Sky Sports News has revealed two emails that appear to prove that the Hammers did contact Sporting with offers for Carvalho.
The text shows that the English club offered around £23m for the Portugal midfielder, including add-ons based on the Hammers qualifying for the Champions League.
The club also proposed a 10% sell-on fee and added that if the deal was not completed “asap” then they would “borrow” a player from Paris Saint-Germain.
The controversy looks set to rumble on, and it seems that West Ham fans are pointing the finger at their owners.
It’s not often a defensive midfielder is seen as the Man of the Match in a 4-0 win, but Nemanja Matic has clearly made himself a bit of a fan favourite at Old Trafford since signing for Manchester United during the summer.
Much like when Jose Mourinho brought the former Chelsea ace back for his second spell at Stamford Bridge, Matic epitomises much about the Portuguese’s current side – height, power, quality and control.
That was very much the order of the day on Sunday too; while Everton did get back into the match for a short period in the second half, United largely controlled proceedings throughout while their immense physicality told in the closing stages, netting three times in the final ten minutes to make it 4-0.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise then, that the towering Serbian international was voted as the Man of the Match from the victory over Everton in Football FanCast’s recent poll.
Matic completed the most passes of any player on the pitch on Sunday, including the assist for Antonio Valencia’s stunning opener.
According to reports in The Mirror, Tottenham Hotspur are keeping tabs on out-of-favour Everton attacker Ademola Lookman, who cost the Toffees £11m when he joined from Charlton Athletic in January.
What’s the word, then?
Well, The Mirror says that Spurs are considering reviving their previous interest in the winger, who has been frozen out by Ronald Koeman so far this season despite an impressive start to his Everton career.
The Mirror says the 19-year-old chose to move to Goodison Park during the January transfer window ahead of a number of other Premier League clubs, including Mauricio Pochettino’s men, but despite scoring on his debut against Manchester City and making seven appearances before the end of the campaign, he has found first team football much harder to come by this term.
How much has he featured?
Not very much at all, to be honest.
The England Under-21 international has played for just 160 minutes in total so far and made two starts – both against Hadjuk Spilt in the Europa League qualifiers.
Even when Everton hosted lower league opposition in Sunderland in the EFL Cup Lookman was named on the substitutes# bench, coming on for the final 17 minutes.
Why hasn’t he been featuring?
It’s difficult to say.
Perhaps Koeman is looking to keep the pressure off of him and not put him in the firing line too much in his early career, but considering the poor start to the season the Toffees have made it is strange that he hasn’t been given more of a chance.
Of course, the additions of the likes of Sandro Ramirez, Wayne Rooney, Gylfi Sigurdsson and Davy Klaassen during the summer haven’t helped his cause, while another new boy Nikola Vlasic also looks to have moved ahead of him in the pecking order.
The fact that the Merseyside outfit don’t play with out-and-out wingers could prove to be a problem for Lookman, and he may feel that he needs to move on to secure regular game time.
Would he be a good signing for Tottenham?
He certainly would be.
The teenager has shown plenty of glimpses of quality in his few Premier League appearances for Everton and he would certainly strengthen a wide position where Tottenham don’t have a lot of options right now.
Pochettino has proven that he can improve and develop young players, and this could be another perfect opportunity to do so.
Aston Villa midfielder Glenn Whelan has seemingly found it difficult to win over the club’s supporters following a difficult start to the season for the pre-season promotion favourites.
Steve Bruce brought the 33-year-old to Villa Park in a £1m deal from Stoke City in July but he has proved to be a scapegoat for the fans in the early stages of the campaign as the Midlands outfit won just one of their opening seven Championship fixtures.
However, even though Villa have now won four on the bounce it hasn’t stopped the Republic of Ireland international getting stick from his own faithful, as was shown on Twitter following the wins against Burton Albion last week and Bolton Wanderers on Saturday.
While the midfielder may not have been at the top of his game in some regards this term, he has perhaps played a more important role than some think he has in others.
Here are three reasons Villa fans need to lay off with the Whelan criticism…
Formation change
Whelan certainly wasn’t the only player struggling in the 4-2-3-1 and 3-4-2-1 systems earlier on in the season – and didn’t deserve to be one of the scapegoats as a result – but he has looked far more comfortable in the standard 4-4-2 formation in recent weeks.
His passing may have been off at points but he is looking to be far more effective in his defensive midfield role now than he perhaps was in August, and his screening of the back four has also been a huge part of Villa conceding just one goal in their last six Championship fixtures.
He is able competition for Jedinak
Despite being a key player for Villa last season Jedinak has played just 45 minutes of Championship football this season because of a groin injury, although he could return to action following the international break.
The Midlands outfit didn’t really have anyone to fill in effectively in the defensive midfield position last term if the Australia international was absent, but now they have the perfect competition and able replacement for him in Whelan.
The 33-year-old showed against Bolton that as well as keeping things simple, he can also put his foot in and play long passes when needed, while he also did well to clear a late effort off the line.
He gives Hourihane more attacking freedom
Whelan wasn’t purchased by Bruce to be a box-to-box midfielder, and if the Republic of Ireland international starts in the centre of the pitch it allows the likes of Conor Hourihane to go forward and try and find a goal for the Midlands outfit.
The 26-year-old has already scored five goals in 10 Championship appearances for Villa this season and much of that is down to the freedom that he has been given to attack as he knows that his Republic of Ireland teammate is there to cover for him in the current system.
When Xherdan Shaqiri signed for Stoke in 2015, it looked like a watershed moment.
In February 2015, Sky Sports and BT Sport paid £5.14bn for the rights to broadcast Premier League football in the UK, with a further £3bn coming from overseas rights. English clubs instantly became richer than God, able to pour riches into the transfer market with liberal abandon, as if it were vinaigrette on a salad. Since then, they’ve attracted the kinds of names who would usually have ended up around Europe’s grand old clubs. Now, instead of joining the likes of the Milan sides, Valencia or Schalke, or even Ajax and Benfica, the Premier League’s mid-table clubs have taken on a glamour they could only have dreamed of a decade or two ago.
The broadcast rights deal is only likely to go higher in the short-to-medium term, too, and is still driving the league’s spending sprees. We’re now seeing a situation where Crystal Palace, rooted to the bottom of the Premier League, can boast the likes of Christian Benteke, Andros Townsend, Wilfried Zaha and Yohan Cabaye in their squad. It doesn’t seem to have made them a very good football team, though.
Stoke, themselves, have the highest number of Champions League winning players in their side this season, and even that’s after selling Marko Arnautovic, who played for Inter Milan under Jose Mourinho in 2010, to West Ham United this summer. The Potters have five players with winner’s medals in their squad despite never having played in the competition themselves; more than Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool put together, in fact.
They have, however, played in the Europa League. But the problem is that, since that season when the potteries welcomed European football for the first time since the 1970s, there doesn’t seem to have been much progress. Not in tangible ways, at any rate.
It’s hard to believe that there should be a glass ceiling in a situation where there’s so much money coming into the Premier League from companies who want to broadcast the games. The rights deals are so big that the sky should be the limit, attracting the best players, the best coaches and getting better every year.
That’s an impossible ask, though. There are two reasonably obvious problems.
One is that the rest of the league has just as much money as Stoke City have. Everyone is in the same boat, and, obviously, not every team can win.
The other problem is that the biggest clubs will always have more. Whatever the Manchester clubs, Arsenal and Chelsea have in the bank in terms of media rights money, they will also get more from their commercial deals, too. Partners around the world pay large sums of cash to sponsor football clubs in various ways, and they’ll pay more for Manchester United or Liverpool than they will for Stoke.
But as the league becomes a battle of franchises, it’s to their credit that Stoke have recognised this problem. Over the last few years, the change in their style of play has, presumably, been less about following a trend and more an attempt to imbue the club with an added class. And there’s a very good reason why: a side with prestigious players with pedigree who have played for some of Europe’s biggest clubs and who now ply their trade with a charmingly stylish Premier League club has marketing potential.
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That way Stoke can attract fans and commercial opportunities outside their core Staffordshire support, a key factor in the growth of most Premier League teams’ wealth. Indeed, overseas TV rights will probably a key reason for the continued growth of wealth in the Premier League over the next few years, and even the likes of West Bromwich Albion and Southampton have seen significant overseas – particularly Far Eastern – investment.
But that’s business, something very different to football. And whilst, in this day and age, no one would argue that clubs shouldn’t be working hard to get their off-the-pitch competitiveness right, surely that’s null and void if sporting success falls by the wayside. For all but the biggest clubs, anyway. Manchester United’s season or two outside of the Champions League didn’t change their status as one of the biggest clubs in the world. But not many teams have that sort of commercial clout.
For Stoke, though, their best moment since their arrival in the Premier League under Tony Pulis was surely their appearance in the 2011 FA Cup final. But whilst they were beaten by Manchester City, that still allowed them a Europa League place the next season, where they went furthest of all the English teams to enter the competition in the group stages. Since then, their run of three ninth place finishes have been bookended by two seasons when they finished in 13th. The first bottom-half finish came in the season they played Europa League football. The other came last year.
And that highlights how difficult it is to get the balance between off and on the pitch right for Premier League clubs these days.
In 2012, Stoke were the only English club to make it out of the group stage of the Europa League, before losing to Valencia in the round of 32. One of the English teams who went out in the groups was Tottenham Hotspur, who, since Stoke’s arrival in the top flight have probably shown more than any other club how you don’t need to spend money on Champions League winners and big names in order to make a mark on the league. And, in turn, they’re making a mark off it, too. From Europa League failures seemingly every season, Spurs are now part of the league’s defined top six and Champions League regulars. They are building a new stadium with the help of the NFL and look like they’re joining the very top of the elite. And they’ve done it all by bringing through players and giving a chance to a young coach who places more emphasis on team structure than individuals
No one could suggest that Stoke should be emulating Spurs’ success. For one thing, the north London side have more resources, are a bigger club and have spent more money than Stoke have. They’re one of the established teams who will always have more than Mark Hughes’ side even with new riches being given to the league. But what they have done is gone about changing their image in a very different way.
It’s been sporting success that changed how people feel about Tottenham as a force in English football, and as a result, their standing around the world will grow.
They’ve spent money – not always very well – and they’ve had some failures along the way, but in a similar time frame as Stoke, Spurs have gone about their business in a different way. Instead of attempting to grow their standing both around the world and within the Premier League, through building a team of recognisable talent, they’ve done it by creating stars, not attempting to revive the likes of Shaqiri and Ibrahim Afellay.
Stoke’s capture of Shaqiri may well have been a watershed moment in the Premier League’s history, showing that the league has become a place where everyone wants to play; even those whose name recognition may well have seen them at clubs who match that stature more comfortably.
But what it’s also done is shown that growth is a holistic thing. Off it, as well as on it, the best way to get recognition is by building something which rises towards the top. In a league where everyone has money, nothing short of obscene riches can take you above everyone else. Instead, the Spurs route of making your team that little bit better every season through coaching and tactics is surely more applicable.
Southampton’s Sofiane Boufal scored a goal of the season contender on Saturday that gave his side victory over West Bromwich Albion in the late English Premier League kick-off at St Mary’s.
Thrown into the match with just nine minutes remaining, Boufal was something of an unlikely match winner but sprinted past almost the entire Baggies team with the ball at his feet to fire a low shot into the bottom corner and secure all three points just five minutes from time.
Having not won in three Premier League matches, it was a huge win for Southampton and a magical moment for Boufal who celebrated in front of his manager, perhaps making a point that he should be getting more game time.
That’s certainly how Saints fans see it and they’re now desperate for him to get more minutes on the pitch after his stunning solo goal.
They took to Twitter to share their thoughts on his performance and prospect of seeing more action…