The howls of derisive laughter expressed by Tottenham Hotspur fans upon hearing the news that Brighton & Hove Albion had made two low-ball bids for Spurs’ Croatian defender Luka Vuskovic were tempered only by a deep-seated unease that Spurs might actually agree to the offer. We shouldn’t have been worried — Brighton made a £30m bid for the highly coveted Vuskovic, who is coming off an impressive loan in Germany with Hamburg and who is now one of the most in-demand young players in world football,
but the approach was immediately rejected for the codswallop that it was.
Spurs fans have been braced for a bigger, more serious approach from Brighton in recent days, but according to the BBC we can sit back and breathe a bit — Brighton do not intend, at least for now, to submit another bid.
That’s not to say that they won’t. Vuskovic’s camp is making a lot of noise that he wants out of his Tottenham contract and to a club that will play him as opposed to another loan. That said, Luka is represented by super-agent Pini Zahavi, and these kinds of strong-arm tactics are pretty par for the course for Zahavi, especially for in-demand players.
My guess is that everything’s going to settle down for a spell until Croatia are out of the World Cup, and then all this stuff will pick up again afterwards. I don’t get the sense that Spurs are keen to sell Vuskovic — although the acquisition of Jan Paul van Hecke and Marcos Senesi suggest that Luka might not be in Roberto De Zerbi’s immediate plans, I can also imagine they’d be fine to loan him out again for another year of top flight first team football. But they’re going to have to figure out what to do with him soon — the decision of whether to integrate him into the first team or sell him for a substantial fee will be a pretty critical one, and it sounds like Vuskovic’s camp wants a pretty substantial say in what happens.
We might get a chance to actually see Luka play — his Croatia national team is scheduled to face England today in World Cup first round action.
