Wednesday evening, all hell broke loose in Tottenham Hotspur’s pursuit of Crystal Palace attacking midfielder Eberechi Eze. Reports over the past several days had said that negotiations between the two clubs were progressing and that an agreement for the 27-year-old England international was almost guaranteed.
And then, it wasn’t. Wednesday evening, reports first emerged that Tottenham had reached full agreement with Palace, but that the club hoped to delay the signing until after their Europa Conference League playoff match against Fredrikstad on Thursday. Shortly afterwards, new reports suggested Tottenham was no longer the only club in the frame to purchase Eze’s contract, and within moments David Ornstein and others reported that Arsenal had not only matched Tottenham’s offer for Eze, but bettered it, and that the player had decided to join Spurs’ arch-rivals instead. As of this article’s posting, Eze will sign with Arsenal for a fee of approximately £68m including escalators and add-ons.
It’s one of the more shocking transfer developments I’ve seen for Spurs in the past few years, and it’s unfortunate that it comes on the heels of the Morgan Gibbs-White and Nottingham Forest fiasco. So what the heck happened? New details are starting to emerge, and paint a picture of collusion between Palace and Arsenal, with Spurs used as a stalking horse and convenient means of discovery.
First, here’s Matt Law summarizing what happened on Twitter:
Miguel Delaney goes even further in the Independent, laying out (in a somewhat muddled and confusing way) how Arsenal had established a transfer structure far ahead of Tottenham’s involvement for Eze, going back to August 10. According to Delaney, Arsenal knew that Eze, a childhood Arsenal fan, had an emotional attachment to the club and that given a choice he would always choose Arsenal over other clubs, including Spurs. Arsenal’s gazumping of Eze, which took place over hours when Spurs had been in complex negotiations for days, came about because of this hidden agreement, even though Arsenal seemingly had decided to back away from negotiations for Eze at the beginning of August, because they felt they needed to sell some players before making a large player purchase. The agreement with Palace was, apparently, kept extremely quiet, with Palace agreeing to delay their deal with Tottenham, knowing Arsenal was likely to come back at some point.
The Independent can now reveal that Arsenal had actually struck the principles of an agreement with Palace as early as the morning of Sunday 10 August. They managed to keep it extraordinarily quiet, as illustrated by how it was only after Wednesday evening’s sensations that multiple sources were willing to talk about it.
There was also the fact that, in those nine days, it didn’t look like Arsenal would follow through on that agreement. The word put out was that they wanted to sell before any other purchase, and that they preferred a left winger. Interest in Eze was repeatedly played down. There had been a lot of mixed messages, which fit with the whole summer as regards Arsenal and the Palace star.
— Miguel Delaney, The Independent
Delaney seems to think that Arsenal were playing 4D chess over this transfer, had knowingly backed away from the Eze deals with the hopes that another club would come in and do some of the legwork for them, and always intended to re-enter the race late with an equal or higher bid. What doesn’t make sense about Delaney’s hypothesis is why, if Arsenal had a secret agreement earlier in the window to purchase Eze for less money, why they’d need another club to come in so they can make a hijack for more money later on.
What makes more sense is that Arsenal had laid a lot of track with Palace earlier in the window, but had decided to back off of their pursuit of Eze for whatever reason. What changed their mind was almost certainly the long-term knee injury to Kai Havertz yesterday. Now needing reinforcement at attacking midfield and knowing that Eze was essentially waiting for the Gunners, Arsenal made their move, using what they knew of Tottenham’s offer and besting it, and very likely offering higher wages to Eze to boot. That’s less a “silent hijacking” as Delaney puts it and more just a standard, old-fashioned gazumping. Still sucks, but it’s not nearly as nefarious.
But still, there’s no getting around it — Spurs were played for suckers, and there was almost certainly collusion between Palace and Arsenal over this deal.
Spurs are (rightfully) furious to have a highly-desired player get snatched out from under them by their biggest rivals. While Spurs fans are instantly gravitating towards yelling at chairman Daniel Levy, it really doesn’t appear that the club did a whole lot wrong. Palace were being somewhat intractable in their negotiations with Tottenham, and clearly knew that Eze would sign with Arsenal given a choice. Levy, one of the most stubborn chairmen in the Premier League, is even garnering some sympathy.
The situation has led to some surprising sympathy for the Spurs chairman within the game. Their own negotiations for Eze had encountered repeated difficulties, as first reported by The Independent on Saturday night. The problems actually preceded that. Talks almost collapsed the Thursday before, and there were constant hold-ups over issues like add-ons and how much was being paid up front. Just when one issue was solved, another would arise.
One description over the last few days was that “the deal is both almost done and constantly at the point of collapse”. There is now a belief, especially within Spurs, that Palace were stalling. They were waiting for Arsenal to come back.
— Miguel Delaney, The Independent
Modern football transfers are frequently long, messy, and often very complicated. It’s very rarely as simple as, as the oft-uttered fan statement goes, “just pay(ing) the money,” because you are dealing with people, not a football computer game simulator, and people can be petty, messy, complicated, and difficult to deal with. In this case, Levy and Johan Lange were dealing with a club that clearly were not especially interested in selling to them, a chairman in Palace’s Steve Parrish with a reputation nearly as difficult as Levy’s, and a player who would only join Tottenham if he had no viable path to sign with Tottenham’s top rival instead. The situation is embarrassing for Spurs, but it’s not especially clear how they could’ve avoided this situation, apart from a drastic overpay, something Spurs almost never do (with good reason).
The situation was absurd enough that even Matt Law, a notable critic of Tottenham stretching back years, felt a little bad for us.
Thanks… I guess?
So what’s next? We’ll probably find out shortly. There’s no time for Tottenham to lick their wounds with 11 days left to go in the window and at least three priority signings to make before it slams shut. There are now reports that Spurs could make another approach for Manchester City winger Savinho, a deal that, in the words of Miracle Max, may only be MOSTLY dead instead of all dead. Other credible rumors suggest Spurs could immediately pivot to Monaco’s 23-year-old midfielder Maghnes Akliouche. Leicester’s Bilal El Khannous still technically hasn’t signed with Palace, meaning he’s also ripe for a proper gazumping, something that feels kind of fitting. There may be other targets on Spurs’ board that we don’t know about; Lange is not above moving in silence to achieve his transfer targets and we are not privy to his conversations in the Spurs war rooms.
We can huff the copium and try and make the hurt go away by suggesting that Eberechi Eze never made a ton of sense in Thomas Frank’s lineup, or that £68m was a wild amount of money for a player who would likely turn 32 by the end of his contract. A lot of these things are even true! But there’s no doubt — this one stings. Whether or not you (or I) are rationalizing what happened, Eze is a good player and it would’ve been extremely fun to watch him play football for Tottenham Hotspur. Now it’s time to pivot to what comes next, and I have to believe that there will be additional players coming in before the end of the month. The real question is whether those players will be as good as Eberechi Eze.
