Remember Dennis Cirkin? A Tottenham Hotspur academy graduate and fullback, Cirkin was highly rated by Football Knowers™ but found his path to the first team more or less blocked. Spurs sold him to Sunderland in 2021 for around £1m.
Now, four years later, Cirkin has turned into a pretty decent fullback, Sunderland have promoted to the Premier League, and Tottenham need homegrown and club trained players to comply with Champions League squad construction. According to the Northern Echo, Tottenham are considering coming back on for their old academy grad, where he would serve as a rotational and backup LB behind Destiny Udogie.
In some ways this is pretty unfortunate timing. When they sold him to Sunderland, then in League One, for cheap, they included a £6m buy-back clause that expired last season when Cirkin was injured. So that no longer comes into play. Sunderland don’t especially want to let him go and can now charge whatever they feel Cirkin’s worth is, although it should be noted that Cirkin is entering into his last season at the Stadium of Light. That said, Spurs also had an undisclosed sell-on clause in Cirkin’s contract, and that could help ameliorate some of what Sunderland would want for him, so Spurs would be in a decent position.
And Cirkin has turned into a pretty tidy player. He was always appreciated well by the academy coaches, and he’s become a regular with the Black Cats over the past few seasons. The Echo say that Cirkin was a key player in Sunderland’s promotion campaign in the Championship last season.
I don’t know if Cirkin would ever become first choice at Spurs, but bringing him home would be kind of neat. He’d get to return to a familiar location, would absolutely get a good amount of first team football with Spurs in multiple competitions, and would likely be had at a pretty affordable price. While the price isn’t listed, I say — sure, let’s go for him! Why not?