Man City signs farmers

Through the joys of multi-club ownership, Manchester City have secured a new sizzling left-footed winger at an extremely fair price, and Troyes have banked a massive profit for a player who never stepped on the pitch for them. City announced Savinho as their new player on Thursday, paying their French sister club £30m for a player who initially cost Troyes €6.5m + some incentives.

Before we get on with the actual analysis, let’s get the jokes out of the way: Savinho is a literal farmer.

Savinho was originally loaned to PSV Eindhoven, where he didn’t make much of an impact. But a loan to fellow City Football Group outfit Girona in La Liga proved to be a fruitful one. He was a dribbling machine who racked up 9 goals and 10 assists, attracting the attention of Girona’s parent club.

So, for the record: Eredivisie? Not a farmers league. La Liga? Farmers league.

Savinho led all La Liga wingers in successful dribbles last season, and was just a tick behind Nico Williams on a per-90 basis. It was particularly productive dribbling too, creating a lot of value for his team. He’s not a shot monster, but he has pretty good shot selection. This is a profile of a good winger.

But even as good as his dribbling was, the standout quality Savinho had last year might have been his shot creation. This is what you want to see from your wingers. I opened this up and immediately said “HELL yeah” to myself.

Did we mention that Savinho is also left-footed? And he can play on either wing? And he’s super durable, playing over 3000 minutes last season? And he’s producing at this level in La Liga at just 20 years old?

I am not making any accusations of financial doping, but I think it is fair to guess that if a player with this profile was on, say, Athletic Bilbao or Villarreal, City would not be able to sign him for £30m. The price of the brick would go up significantly. I don’t know if he’ll be good enough to displace City’s current star attackers, because that’s an outrageously high bar for any player to clear. But he’s certainly good enough to be worth a lot more than what they paid for him. We might have to stop calling footballers farmers as a derogatory term.

—KM

News and Rumours

• Welcome to all the new readers from The Anfield Wrap. We had a lovely, long relationship with Neil and the crew over at StatsBomb, and are excited to hook back up over in the content world again.

• Matt Slater reports the Friedkin Group takeover of Everton is off. That’s a huge blow to Everton fans and once again puts the club on the brink.

• Ben Jacobs reports Jaden Philogene was signed with Aston Villa on a 5-year contract. The fee is £12.5M with a 30% sell-on clause. He’s definitely not a Champions League player yet, but that price feels like a reasonable punt for young Premier League squad depth.

• Romano reported yesterday that Manchester United have agreed personal terms with Manuel Ugarte. You can find Kim’s breakdown of him here. He has the same agent as Leny Yoro and that agent is… Jorge Mendes.

• Spurs rumours went from non-existent earlier in the summer to pleasantly buzzed this week. In addition to the strong Chiesa links yesterday and the ongoing Jonathan David links (which make sense), The S*n reports them in contention with Fulham to sign Scott McTominay. If we were to guess, given the source and the teams involved, this feels more like agents agenting than actual interest from North London. The Chiesa interest stacks up though.

• We were (slightly) mean in comparing Matias Soule to Andros Townsend earlier in the week, but we wanted to stress that this was strictly a shot locations thing and nothing related to Soule’s potential performance, and it completely ignores his elite creative passing. Maybe now revered Internet scout MoeSquare will put us back in his good graces.
  
  Oh, and Leicester City are still fencing with Juventus on price to try and get this deal across the line.

• PSG are torn between their happy place (selling Ugarte off to Manchester United) and their sad place (the vice grip Benfica hold on their balls as they try to pursue Joao Neves for half his release clause). Some men willingly pay for that situation.

• West Ham are apparently the landing place of all London-based or England-based castoff rumours, with Reiss Nelson and Wan-Bissaka linked in the last two days. This was after a month of them being linked with all good-not-great Spanish players as Lopetegui links.

• Al-Nassr have had a €30M bid for Manchester City GK Ederson rejected. Their focus has apparently shifted, and they are now hungry for Ederson’s Brazil teammate Bento, who disappointingly is not a box-to-box midfielder (ahem), but is instead another GK.

• Speaking of the Saudi Pro league, there’s potentially interest in buying Moussa Diaby from Aston Villa for a price allegedly near £50M. This was a transfer we completely missed last summer while we were working on a more egg-shaped football product and thus found ourselves scratching our heads as how this particular player ended up as a “Club Record Transfer Fee” from Bayer Leverkusen. He’s a perfectly cromulent attacker with good but not exceptional creative passing ability. The Saudis would be saving Villa from themselves simply by matching the overpriced fee Villa stumped up last summer.
  
  tl;dr he’s fine, but they can probably do better. Villa paid a dumb price. Don’t shoot yourselves in the foot by holding out for too much when you can get out of a mistake.

• Blah blah, Mason Greenwood to Marseille for completeness sake. The mayor’s take was notable.

• Marc Cucurella dyed his hair red after winning the Euros. That’s it. That’s the story.

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