Well THIS is interesting. We’ve been navigating the news that Tottenham Hotspur’s Swedish midfielder Lucas Bergvall is dissatisfied with the amount of playing time he is expected to receive at Spurs next season and is pushing to be sold to another club. But while a couple of teams have shown interest, we haven’t really gotten anything beyond that.
This makes sense, since Bergvall is away playing in the World Cup with Sweden, and the odds are he’ll return to Spurs and have a conversation about his future
with Roberto De Zerbi before any decisions are made. But today, Gianluca DiMarzio, both on his podcast and in a subsequently posted story on his website, suggested that Spurs have already beaten back a £43m (€50m) approach for Bergvall from an unnamed Premier League club.
The assertion comes in a short essay from DiMarzio where the broader discussion is about the extraordinary spending power of Premier League clubs compared to Serie A clubs and why Italian teams are finding it so hard to compete in the transfer market.
All this to say, though — English clubs aren’t stupid. It’s not like they’re selling off their players cheap just because they’re buying new ones. Take Bergvall, for example — a Tottenham player who might get less playing time given all the signings Tottenham are making, so he’s working with his agents to leave. And you might think: “Oh, I’ll just go in, maybe take him on loan, offer 30, offer 35, and they’ll let him go.”
But no. Napoli, who are among the most interested clubs — especially in Italy — and who’ve made moves to find out more, were thinking maybe 40 million euros tops to get him. Instead, Tottenham turned down 50 million in recent days from an English club — likely Nottingham Forest — and I don’t think they’ll go below that threshold.
This is interesting on a couple of levels. First, it suggests that for the right price Bergvall might be sold this summer, whether we like it or not. But second, it suggests that if they do let Bergvall leave it won’t be on loan or on the cheap: whichever club wants Bergvall will have to pay through the nose to get him.
Spurs beat Barcelona to the signing of Bergvall in 2024 and purchased him for £8.5m. The price range that DiMarzio references represents a significant profit for Spurs. Rejecting £43m from (supposedly) Nottingham Forest for Bergvall makes me feel a little better about the idea of selling him this summer. Forest had reportedly identified Bergvall as their preferred midfield replacement for Elliot Anderson, and while I’d be sad if he leaves, a transfer fee of £45m-50m is a significant outlay and in a summer where we’re clearly trying to transform the club in the short term, it’s an eye-opening figure. Also, while we all like Bergvall, he does have holes in his game at the moment (specifically passing) that may or may not improve. You can make a cromulent argument in favor or in opposition to the idea of selling him vs. developing him and hope he fulfills the great promise he had when we signed him from Djurgardens.
Letting your (newly) homegrown and club-trained young Swedish midfielder isn’t great. Letting him go for cheap would be significantly worse than letting him go for a 600% profit.
