Yesterday when Fabrizio Romano (sigh) first broke the news that a deal had been reached to send Savinho from Manchester City to Tottenham Hotspur, it was big on bombast but light on details. And for those of you who like your Romano bombas confirmed by actual journalists, I have good news — David Ornstein of the Athletic has confirmed that an agreement has been reached, and even better, has transfer and contract fee details as well.
Romano’s tweet just said the transfer fee was “more than £75m” but didn’t clarify what that means. Now we know. £75m + £10m in add-ons with £5m of them “highly achievable” is a LOT of money, but as we talked about yesterday it’s likely slightly juiced by the separate deal for Omar Marmoush, which is apparently very far along the road to confirmation as well. Supposedly Spurs upped the asking price for Savinho with the expectation that they’d bid a little lower for Marmoush in order to save Manchester City a little cash by screwing over Eintracht Frankfurt’s sell-on clause. You can argue about the ethics of that particular deal, but clubs do this kind of stuff all the time. While the bulk of this particular deal falls on City, you can also recall that Tottenham did a similar thing to PSG over the transfer fee of Giovani Lo Celso when Spurs bought him from Real Betis.
Anyway, £85m for a relatively unproven (but absurdly talented) player who has been desperate to join our club for weeks is a lot of money, but importantly it’s not MY money. And Spurs have done enough good work shipping out players that the net spend is likely going to end up looking pretty reasonable, comparatively speaking.
Again, I don’t expect we’ll see Savinho suiting up for Spurs this weekend at Brentford, it’s just too soon. But he’ll be in training as soon as this deal goes through, and it wouldn’t shock me if he features at least at a minor level in the mid-week League Cup home match vs. Charlton. And maybe his City teammate Marmoush will be joining him there.
