Cartilage Free Captain

good morning!

Well, Sunday was stuffed with sports. From dawn to well past dusk, there was always something good on the television. And with DC having another brutally hot day, it was the perfect day to stay inside.

Here’s a quick recap:

Tour de France, stage 15: Tadej Pogacar came up with a big, big stage win (his second in a row) with the race now in its final week. The Slovenian cyclist added to his lead over Danish rival Jonas Vingegaard, a gap that is now 3:09.

Vingegaard believes the race isn’t over, but it sure feels close to it.

Wimbledon, men’s singles final: What a dominant service display from Carlos Alcaraz, who defeated Novak Djokovic 6-2 6-2 7-6.

Djokovic felt flat the whole match, but Alcaraz also didn’t give him much of a chance. He was serving much bigger and took advantage of Djokovic’s limited movement. It is the Spaniard’s fourth major singles title, and he’s still only 21. He’s also one of the rare players to get the Roland Garros-Wimbledon double.

Euros, final: A boring first half gave way to an exhilerating 45 minutes, with Nico Williams scoring the opener within the first two minutes of the second half.

Jude Bellingham looked the best player for England out there on the day, and it was his pass that set up Cole Palmer’s equaliser. Then, late on, Marc Guehi lost Mikel Oyarzabal, who perfectly timed his run. 2-1 Spain, and more heartache for England.

MLB: Our last round of games before the All Star break. Among the excitement was a walkoff win for the Orioles, who currently hold a one-game lead over the Yankees in the AL East.

Copa America: We’re still in the first half as I type, and I’m not watching it. You folks might. It looked like there was a scary security breach that delayed the start of the match.

Fitzie’s track of the day: Blue Monk, by Thelonious Monk

And now for your links:

Alasdair Gold: Lucas Bervall and Archie Gray make appearances in closed-doors friendly

Harry Kane speaks on the pain of losing after defeat to Spain

Gareth Southgate says ‘now not the time’ to decide future

Filed under:

Tottenham Transfer News & Rumors

Dispatches from #batcountry

Dispatches from Bat Country: July 2024 - Edition 2, Country of Bats

If you build it, Bats will come.

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"'What's wrong?' I yelled. 'We can't stop here. This is bat country!'"

- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Is it me, or has it felt strangely quiet following the signing of Archie Gray? Well, never fear - Bat Country is here, and we still have an absolute hodgepodge of players you’ve never heard of to talk about. Leave your cares and worries behind and instead dare to dream - Audere est facere and all that. We all know the club had Bat Country in mind when they came up with that.

Here we cover all those rumors on which we normally wouldn’t report. The fringe cases. The names that spring up from untold lands, off the beaten path. We’ll discuss mostly incomings and try and focus on names we haven’t already talked about elsewhere on the site. Each name will be accompanied by a Guano Meter: a ranking out of 5 that instead of rating how likely we think it is to happen, it instead is the complete opposite. For example, a Guano Meter of 5/5 would be something like... Ryan Mason deciding to return to playing and suiting up as one of Ange’s attacking 8’s next season. I admit, I’d be intrigued (and terrified).

Check out some of the previous editions here, as well as Nathan Bartel’s excellent piece that was the genesis of this series here.

Youssef En-Nesyri

Are you someone who thinks the real loss from Harry Kane leaving is his heading on defensive set pieces? Then boy, do I have a player for you

En-Nesyri is a beast of a striker, with great holdup play and aerial ability... not to mention a fair few goals over the last few seasons for Sevilla

With that said... he’s been a player who’s always been a bit hot and cold when it comes to goals, with multiple double figure seasons surrounding seasons where he’s struggled to put the ball in the net

He’s struggled with injury at times as well, and at 27, that’s not likely to be getting any better

With one year left on his contract, he’s looking for a new club, with his agent obviously shopping him around a bit; Sevilla want him off the books too, to help balance their books

With that in mind, he’s been linked with a long laundry list of clubs: West Ham, Fenerbahce, Bologna, with Roma now seemingly favorites for his signature

Which brings us to Spurs - from what I can find, Tottenham were mentioned off-hand by a Sevilla radio station. It’s a quality piece of sourcing

Guano Meter: 5/5 - There’s been multiple leaks around Spurs’ targets at striker over the last few months, and En-Nesyri has never once been mentioned. This is just agent talk... at best.

Chris Fuhrich

Able to play across the front line, and even in midfield, but mostly deployed at left wing, Fuhrich has just come off an excellent season for Stuttgart

Maybe I’m being culturally ignorant (read: probably) but does a German footballer with the first name ‘Chris’ strike anybody else as funny? It would be like a Dutch midfielder having the name Nigel de Jong

Moniker aside, Fuhrich loves a dribble, and he’s aggressive with his passing as well - he could be a good fit in an Ange Postecoglou side

That said, it feels like he may have been an option we looked at before signing Timo Werner? I dunno, I’m not sure we’re still in for him, and the links have quietened as of late

There were a few days there last month though where his name came out of nowhere and seemed everywhere... Christian Falk at Bild seemed to be the original source, and even Fabrizio Romano picked it up

Alasdair Gold then poo-poo’d the links, albeit with an odd choice of wording, saying the club were “distancing themselves from reports linking them” to Fuhrich; but that doesn’t mean Spurs aren’t interested, per se

Guano Meter: 3/5 - Probably one of a few names on a list; and I’d say at this point not particularly high on it. Release clauses are at play here, so it’s possibly one to keep in the back of your mind.

Viktor Tsyhankov

Oh God another Slavic-language name which has about ten different spellings when translated to English. Do I use the Transfermarkt spelling, or the fbref spelling?

Big Vik, as I’m going to call him (totally ironically at 5’9”) is a Ukrainian national currently at Girona, heading to Spain from Dynamo Kyiv for... some reason or other

He’s another winger (playing mostly on the right), but is also comfortable in attacking midfield roles as well, and has occasionally played as a wingback

He’s probably not quite as an effective dribbler as Fuhrich above, but he’s aggressive with his passing and his end product has been not too shabby in La Liga: 11 goals and 13 assists in 43 starts

There’s a release clause at play here: apparently £25.5 million could secure you Big Vik’s signature

There’s all sorts of links with various clubs to Big Vik if you look around the internet, which smells like agent talk... and Spurs’ sole link is from the Daily Mail

Guano Meter: 5/5 - I mean, it could be The Sun, right? But even it not being the Sun isn’t enough to pull this one up to a 4.

Andreas Pereira

Here’s a name that may be familiar to a few: Pereira is a Brazilian - or Belgian? Let’s go with Belgilian - attacking midfielder who came through Manchester United’s youth system, arguably failed there on a number of occasions, before landing at Fulham

Do you honestly want to hold somebody not quite working out at this United team against them, though?

After a mixed time while at United, and being loaned out to any manner of club and country, he’s been solid (though unspectacular) since moving to Fulham at the start of the 22/23 season

Pereira almost profiles as a pure #10, and they don’t really exist anymore in modern football, which is kind of why his numbers can look quite funny...

Low defensive actions, high output for a midfielder but low for a winger, key pass numbers interesting... it’s a strange profile, but there’s seemingly talent there

However, he’s 28 - is this a player we really want to be gambling on?

Well, Spurs probably aren’t - because the solitary link comes from Globo in Brazil, and just positively reeks of agent talk: Spurs, along with a number of other Premier League clubs slightly higher on the Premier League ladder than Fulham, have “expressed interest” in Pereira. Sure thing, Andy. Can I call you Andy?

Guano Meter: 5/5 - Come on, did you expect anything different?

Lutsharel Geertruida

Winning the Eredivisie in 22/23, and runners-up last season, Feyenoord have had some pretty decent players in recent years; Geertruida is one of them

Geertruida is nominally a right back, and one who likes to get forward and have a crack from distance; oddly though, he’s also pretty comfortable at CB

Spurs have been looking at hybrid FB/CB options; is it possible they may prioritize a left-sided player though, with the signing of Archie Gray, as well as Dragusin’s ability to cover RCB?

I packed Geertruida a couple years back in FIFA Ultimate Team, and he was awesome. That doesn’t mean we should sign him, but also we should definitely sign him

Impressive fbref without context (well, some context, Eredivisie numbers, bad league comparisons, yada yada):

Seriously, though - he’d be pretty damn good at the inverted role, especially with his ability on the ball

Would he come to Spurs to be a backup, though? And would Feyenoord, who have been losing a few players after the departure of Arne Slot to Liverpool, even sanction a sale at this point?

Maybe not; the links have gone pretty quiet over the last few weeks

There was a LOT of smoke before that, however, with pretty solid Dutch sources saying Spurs were interested (which of course then made its way around a number of tabloids)

He also visited Tottenham Hotspur Stadium back in April...

Guano Meter: 3/5 - Things have gone a bit quiet on this one, with Spurs perhaps choosing to focus elsewhere.

Bastien Meupiyou

A player with a name that immediately screams self-confidence and superiority to opposition players, Meupiyou is a young French center back who has come through the youth system at FC Nantes

He has a solitary appearance for the senior team, playing 8 minutes last season

With a low number of minutes like that, you’d expect him to have come on as a substitute. Nope, he started, and was sent off almost immediately - which you can see here. Dumb challenge, but dude went down easier than... well, I’m sure you can think of some sort of lurid idiom here

Look, there’s just not much to go on here because Meupiyou just hasn’t played much senior football. Interestingly, though, he’s played quite a bit as a defensive midfielder at youth level

This one comes from L’Equipe, who don’t tend to publish stuff that is on the level of tabloids, and is backed up by a couple of other French outlets

It’s just interest at this point though, with nothing beyond that being reported

Guano Meter: 4/5 - Maybe he’s one for the future? I just don’t know.

That’s it for this installment. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a winged mammal, dummy. Welcome to Bat Country.

Tottenham Hotspur cruised past Cambridge United 7-2 in the first preseason friendly match of the 2024-25 preseason on Saturday afternoon. The match was a behind-closed-doors friendly game that was not open to the public, nor was it televised or screened.

According to the Evening Standard, Brennan Johnson scored a hat trick and Son Heung-Min had an additional brace in the first half as Spurs led 5-0 at the break. The second half featured a full rotationand ended 2-2 for the final score; Mikey Moore was reported to be one of the second-half scorers, and there was participation from academy players Jamie Donley, Tyrese Hall, George Abbott, and Luca Gunter.

The reports state Spurs started a strong lineup in the first half, with Johnson and Sonny supported by numerous first-team players such as Pedro Porro, Dejan Kulusevski, Yves Bissouma, and Manor Solomon. New signings Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall played in the second half, with Gray at right back and Bergvall in a creative role in central midfield. Timo Werner also played in the second half according to Football.London along with Oliver Skipp, Emerson Royal, and James Maddison.

It’s tough to write a review article for a match nobody could see, and there’s probably not much point in looking too deeply into this one. Spurs are without a number of first team players including Cuti Romero and Giovani Lo Celso (away at Copa America), while almost all of the players who participated in the EUROs are still on vacation, so this was certainly an opportunity to give notable youngsters and players like Solomon coming back from long term injuries a chance to get some minutes in their legs.

Earlier this year, Jessica Naz became the first Tottenham Hotspur Women academy product to earn a call-up to the England women’s national team. Last night, she officially became a fully capped England international footballer.

Naz, a speedy forward for Spurs Women and graduate of Tottenham’s academy, was a second-half substitute for England manager Sarina Wiegman as England earned a 2-1 win over Ireland in EURO qualification. Naz replaced Alessia Russo in the 71st minute, and nearly scored right out of the gate, closing down the Ireland keeper and deflecting a clearance off the woodwork.

After the match, Naz shared a lovely moment with fellow England debutee and Chelsea striker Aggie Beever-Jones.

Naz called her debut “a dream come true” and it represents just how far she’s come over the past couple of seasons. She overcame a serious injury a couple of seasons ago that kept her out of Tottenham’s side for a full year and has turned into one of Spurs’ key players, scoring seven goals last season in WSL action and helping Tottenham Women reach their first ever FA Cup final. Now it looks like she could be part of the next wave of England women’s football stars. It’s awesome.

Congrats to Jess!

Yesterday, Matty wrote about Troy Parrott heading to the Netherlands for a medical ahead of a permanent move to Eredivisie side AZ Alkmaar. Today, we can report that the deal is officially done, as per AZ’s social media.

The transfer fee between Tottenham and AZ is €8m (£6.7m), but Spurs will have a 20% future sell-on fee in Parrott’s contract, so if he is sold elsewhere for a larger fee Tottenham will get a small cut of that sale.

Parrott, a full Ireland international, was one of the most exciting Tottenham Hotspur youngster prospects in years when he was signed from Belvedere as a 15-year-old in 2017. In the succeeding years after signing a professional contract, he went out on a series of uneventful loans before finally seeming to find his place in the Netherlands. He had 10 league goals this past season while on loan at Excelsior before going HAM in the Eredivisie relegation playoffs, scoring seven goals including two hat tricks.

Some Spurs fans are going to be disappointed that Ange Postecoglou and company have decided to part ways with Troy instead of giving him a chance in preseason training, but I think this makes sense for Troy’s career. Tottenham already have three more young strikers in the pipeline in Dane Scarlett, Alejo Veliz, and Will Lankshear — something has to give. And regardless of what you think of Parrott’s potential going forward, getting €8m for an young striker should be considered a major success of Tottenham’s academy. Besides, the Eredivisie is weird — I can certainly see a scenario where Troy turns into a prolific scorer in the Netherlands and parlays that into a move back to the UK or a larger league in Europe down the road.

For the last time — good luck, Party Parrott!

Good news, everyone! Today Tottenham Hotspur announced that 19-year old forward Will Lankshear has signed a new professional contract at Spurs that will keep him at the club for the next five seasons.

Lankshear’s been playing above his years, scoring 32 goals in the PL2 with the U21 team at age 18 as Spurs’ academy squad raced to the PL2 title this season. He’s a big lad and has been absolutely spectacular for Tottenham this season, and the new contract represents both a reward for his excellent season and a real statement of belief that he could be a very good player for Spurs in the future.

Lankshear is in the same age group cohort as fellow strikers Dane Scarlett and Alejo Veliz. All three of them have potential to be solid players, but Lankshear just might have the best upside out of any of them. That doesn’t mean he’s a guarantee to become a starter for Tottenham Hotspur, but landing a five year deal as an 18-year-old is a pretty strong indication that the Tottenham coaching staff thinks he just might.

I love the fact that Spurs have put a real emphasis on identifying and signing young talent for the development squad. Youth progression is never linear (looking at you, Troy Parrott) and there’s always the chance that we overhype a player only to see him become good rather than great. That’s okay too. It’s fun to dream on guys like Lankshear who show immense promise as young players. Sometimes, they even realize their potential. Will now has five more years to do that while a Tottenham player, and that’s cool.

Well, it seems like we might have an update on AC Milan’s pursuit of Tottenham Hotspur right back Emerson Royal. According to a tweet from Alasdair Gold, Spurs have rejected a “formal offer” from the Serie A giants as they’re holding out for a fee of €20m, and Milan did not meet that threshold.

Now — great, fine. But let’s dig into this a bit. This tweet actually comes on the heels of another one from the depths of Bat Country Sky Sports Italia, which says Milan are thinking of moving on to other targets because Tottenham are too mean. (Apologies for the aggregator tweet, but I can’t find the original source with a bathysphere.)

So what we have here are two football clubs that have been negotiating for the sale of a player for weeks now. Tottenham have their price in mind, Milan have their price in mind, and neither are really willing to budge at the moment. So this is, naturally, the point where (as one of my colleagues put it in the writer’s room) “both clubs start talking about their girlfriends who go to other schools.”

It’s kind of hilarious that both sides are apparently now negotiating via the media by dropping links to other players or clubs — Strahinja Pavlovic for Milan, Dortmund for Tottenham, but this is the Way of Things — these reports will make the rounds and freak out both sets of supporters a bit before they eventually come to the table and hash out an agreement that ends up being, say, €17.5m over five years with a couple of easily-attainable performance clauses. I’ve been around the block a few times here, and 85% of the time that’s how this goes.

I also am amused by the framing that Tottenham have rejected a “formal offer” for the player, as though making an offer FORMAL is somehow the magic sauce that makes a transfer happen and not the weeks of “informal” talks and negotiations where they very obviously lay out how much they’re willing to pay well ahead of time. Extemporaneously dropping the Formal Bid, delivered by royal courier with trumpet fanfare no doubt, feels like an extremely Football Manager conceit. It’s unlikely to move the needle much and is designed more for media pearl-grasping than any substantial dealmaking, at least at this stage.

So anyway, we’re in the predictable high-conflict period of transfer negotiations now. We’ve seen these before. We’ll see them again. Are Milan really interested in their B-target? Yeah, maybe. Is there actual solid interest in Emerson Royal from Dortmund? Who knows! That’s not the point. These are teams trying to get the other one to flinch, and the odds are very good eventually they’ll settle on a fee that will make both of them, if not happy, then at least satisfied. And if it all falls apart? Well, that sucks, but que sera sera.

According to reporting in The Athletic, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton are close to an amicable agreement regarding the future of former Spurs midfield star Dele.

Dele, who cost Tottenham £5m (and was better than Özil) in 2015, was sold to Everton in January of 2022 in an unusual deal that was initially a free transfer but relied heavily on future performance- and appearance-based payments from Everton. Dele has had an awful time of it since, struggling with form, fitness, injury, and mental health, and met very few of those performance benchmarks. He has only made 13 total appearances for Everton, plus an additional 13 for Besiktas, where he spent the 2022-23 season on loan. He missed the entire 2023-24 season through injury, and his initial Everton contract expired in June.

Everton would like to keep him, but that presents a problem, as according to Patrick Boyland and Jay Harris his contract stated that Tottenham were due a sizable payment should he extend his stay with the Toffees. Dele is technically out of contract at the moment; he accepted an invitation to train at Tottenham to maintain his fitness this summer, and is now back at Everton’s Finch Farm training center, where the club kindly offered to help him continue with his rehabilitation from injury.

The new agreement would see Dele sign a new contract with Everton, while Tottenham would retain an undisclosed sell-on fee in the event Everton sell him to another club in the future.

What seems pretty abundantly clear is that both Spurs and Everton both ultimately want what’s best for Dele. He’s had a rough time of it over the past few seasons, and while he may never reach the promise he showed as a young player at Tottenham in his early 20s, there’s every chance he can still be a solid professional footballer with what’s left of his career. Tottenham aren’t going to get the (modest) fee they expected when they basically let him go to Everton for nothing, but they lose very little by negotiating in good faith for a former player and maintaining a small financial stake in his future. This feels like a good deal.

I admit the romantic in me was thrumming with the possibility of Ange Postecoglou offering a pay-to-play contract to Dele so he could come back to Spurs and be a role player for Spurs this coming season, but that never seemed likely. Dele’s future lies elsewhere, but he deserves the club’s (and the fans’) support for everything he’s gone through over the past few years.

The dust hasn’t fully settled yet from the post-match fracas after Wednesday’s Copa America semifinal between Colombia and Uruguay. Ten-man Colombia defeated Uruguay to reach the Copa America final this Sunday against Argentina, but the story of the match was the fight that kicked off between Uruguayan players, including Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Rodrigo Bentancur, and Colombian fans in the stands, after a stadium security failure that threatened the safety of the Uruguay players’ families.

Now, according to Uruguayan football reporter Rodrigo Romano, the South American football federation CONMEBOL has listed 11 Uruguay players, including Bentancur and Liverpool striker Darwin Nunez, as being under investigation for their roles in the altercation. CONMEBOL will investigate all 11 players with video evidence, with possible sanctions and fines to be handed out at the conclusion of the investigation. No players will be sanctioned or suspended prior to the Copa America third place match between Uruguay and Canada.

URUGUAY DEVELOPMENT

Around 8:00 p.m., AUF received the documents that have the 11 names of the players who participated in the final episodes for CONMEBOL.

The documents contain the names, (kit) number in the competition and the cause attributed to them for the purposes of dealing with future sanctions.

The 11 players are:

Each of the players’ names is accompanied by film evidence and the reason for which a disciplinary file is opened.

Until next Wednesday 17 AUF you will have time to present your defenses in writing.

After that day, a period will begin for CONMEBOL to study and resolve whether or not to sanction each of the aforementioned players.

There are no preventive sanctions, so these players are fit to play on Saturday against Canada.

The corresponding penalties must be served in the 2026 Qualifiers matches, starting next September when, during the resumption, Uruguay will host Paraguay and then visit Venezuela.

There may also be a financial fine if deemed appropriate.

Several Uruguayan players and staff members went into the crowd at the conclusion of the match to confront Colombian fans who had breached security into an area containing members of Uruguay players’ families. Several Uruguay players gave comments to the media saying they feared their loved ones were in danger and they acted to protect them.

Bentancur was not among the players who went into the stands, but he was caught on video throwing two objects into the crowd, including a bottle which hit a Uruguay staffer in the side of the head, injuring and bloodying him.

The investigations announced today are instigated solely by CONMEBOL and any sanctions that would arise from this investigation would be limited to internationally-sanctioned matches, notably future World Cup qualifiers. At present, there has been no further information about sanctions from other world soccer bodies, including FIFA or the FA.

Bentancur started the match against Colombia but was substituted in the first half after picking up an injury from a collision with one of his teammates. His status for the third-place match against Canada is unknown.

It’s been a bit quiet on the incomings front for Tottenham Hotspur over the last week, with the outgoings heating up instead. News has filtered through around the futures of the likes of Emerson Royal, Jamie Donley, and Djed Spence, among others. The latest name to be mentioned on that front is Troy Parrott, the Irish youth product who now seems destined to depart Tottenham Hotspur:

The news comes from Alasdair Gold, reporting for Football London, and confirms a rumor that has been making its way around the web over the last few days. Questions were initially raised when Parrott didn’t appear in any of the training ground photos as the players made their way back for preseason, before Paul O’Keefe (who we typically don’t reference as a primary source) alluded to the fact that the young striker was headed to AZ Alkmaar.

Gold’s report all but confirms those rumors, and the mention of a fee and scheduled medical means that barring some sort of hidden injury, this one is probably close to being done. £6.7 million is a pretty good price for an academy product; many were hoping for bigger and better things for Parrott, but youth development is never linear and Spurs’ mixed approach to youth, some tough loans, and some off-field issues have resulted in Parrott’s future lying elsewhere.

Parrott spent last season on loan in the Eredivisie, where he was one of the few bright spots for an Excelsior Rotterdam side who ended up relegated to the Eerste Divisie, scoring 10 goals and providing 4 assists in 25 appearances. Looking at home in the Dutch League, a club like AZ is probably a good fit for him: bigger, with higher expectations and better players but at a level at which he’s probably more comfortable.

We’ll have more on this as it unfolds, and in the meantime, we can start to mourn the loss of the Party Parrott.