Heads up! We have a new Tottenham Hotspur transfer rumor, courtesy of the BBC’s Sami Mockbel. According to Sami (who for years was the best football journalist at a very bad paper in the Daily Mail), Tottenham are in negotiations with Brentford for the transfer of 28-year old Congolese forward Yoane Wissa. The player is said to be open to leaving to come to Tottenham.
So on the one hand, Wissa (along with Bryan Mbeumo, who is probably going to United) were super fun to watch under Thomas Frank at Brentford last season. He scored 19 goals and had 4 assists last season, and was putting up ABSURD xG/90 numbers — 0.65. If you go into FBRef and sort the Premier League players by xG/90, you’ll find him fifth, behind only Erling Haaland, Mohamed Salah, Alexander Isak, and Diogo Jota (RIP brother). He had a monster year for Brentford, is only making £25k/wk in wages, and if you’re a “he score goals” kind of fan, that’s pretty exciting news.
That said, there are reasons to think this might not be the result of a particularly good process. For starters, Wissa is 28 (until he’s 29). Last season was the best of his career by far, and he had a pretty good situation with the Bees. This would not be a long term signing, and there are open questions as to whether he could recreate that level of production at Spurs next season, even under Frank. Brentford are very, very unlikely to want to lose both Mbeumo and Wissa in the same offseason. Yes, Wissa knows Frank and presumably wants to keep working with him, but it scares me a little that Tottenham seem to only be turning over rocks in the Premier League, rather than looking for undervalued talent on the continent.
The only way this deal would make sense to me is if it’s LITERALLY a deal, and a shockingly good one. You can fabricate a rationale in your head that, say, Wissa might be running down his contract and has given Brentford an ultimatum — sell me to Spurs (or some other club), or I’ll leave on a free transfer and you get nothing. If that’s the case, Brentford and Spurs could come to some kind of accord for a low transfer fee, maybe with some performance based escalators or something to sweeten the pot a bit.
Or maybe this is also a means of screwing over Manchester United? If Spurs buy Wissa before United can seal the deal on Mbeumo, that makes Bryan’s transfer a lot less palatable to Brentford. This possibility also opens up all kinds of fun conspiracy theory-ish behind-the-scenes shenanigans.
In the end, as fun as he was last season Yoane Wissa is not a player Spurs should be spending a ton of money on. If he costs something like £40m-50m, I’m out. But if he comes cheap, that re-frames the entire issue for me. I’m still not convinced it would be a GOOD signing, but it’s at least justifiable, especially if Frank needs a Brentford player to come in as a binky.
Let’s see what happens and what details emerge in the coming days.