TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR and Manchester City were competing to make the most eye-catching transfer of deadline day last night, with Spurs appearing to snatch Fulham midfielder Clint Dempsey from under the noses of Liverpool and the Premier League champions agreeing deals for Benfica’s Javi Garcia for £15.8 million (€19.9 million), and Fiorentina’s Matija Nastasic for £12 million (including Stefan Savic as a makeweight), subject to the paperwork arriving.
United States international Dempsey was having a medical at White Hart Lane last night. Aston Villa, Liverpool and Sunderland had been interested in signing Dempsey, who was understood to prefer a switch to Merseyside.
However, Tottenham joined the race late on and appeared to have moved into pole position as the clock ticked down ahead of the transfer deadline.
On a typically frenetic final day of the transfer window at White Hart Lane, the club finalised the €10million capture of the France goalkeeper Hugo Lloris (the fee could rise to €15million), despite a furious boardroom-level row in which the Lyon president, Jean-Michel Aulas, accused his Tottenham counterpart, Daniel Levy, of broken promises and unethical behaviour.
Tottenham sold Rafael van der Vaart to Hamburg, his former club, for £10 million, while they moved Giovani dos Santos to Real Mallorca for £4 million and loaned Danny Rose to Sunderland for the rest of the season.
There was drama, too, over a supposed £19.8 million offer to Porto for Joao Moutinho. Tottenham’s largest previous outlay on the transfer market was the £16.6 million they paid to Dynamo Zagreb for Luka Modric in 2008, but they showed willingness to better that with the move for Moutinho, seen as Modric’s replacement. Modric completed his protracted £30 million transfer to Real Madrid on Monday.
Villas-Boas worked with Moutinho when he was the Porto manager, and identified the 25- year-old as his priority midfield signing upon taking over at Tottenham in July. Villas-Boas had been pessimistic about the chances of a deal being completed, largely because he knows the Porto president, Pinto da Costa, always sells players at extremely high prices and, perhaps, because he could not see Levy extending himself so fully.
Only on Thursday, Villas-Boas described the move for Moutinho as “impossible”. But Levy’s offer to Porto demonstrated the faith he has in Villas-Boas, who has reshaped the team’s midfield with the signings of Gylfi Sigurdsson from Hoffenheim for £8 million and Moussa Dembele from Fulham for £15 million.
The finances were complicated as Sporting Lisbon, who sold Moutinho to Porto for €10 million in 2010, were owed 25 per cent of any future sale profits, while a third-party investor owned 15 per cent of the player’s economic rights.
At City, in the closing 24 hours, Roberto Mancini signed Internazionale’s Maicon for £3.1 million and Swansea City’s Scott Sinclair for £6.2 million. He also recruited Richard Wright on a free transfer as his third-choice goalkeeper.
On a frantic day, Southampton paid a reported £12 million for the Bologna winger Gaston Ramirez while Fulham completed deals for Dimitar Berbatov and Kieran Richardson. Everton completed their fourth permanent signing of the summer with the £2 million capture of Copenhagen’s Bryan Oviedo, while Swansea spent £5.5 million on the Valencia winger Pablo Hernandez.
