Football might be known as ‘the beautiful game’ and create a lot of amazing memories for everyone involved in it, the business side of football can so often be murky and a touch darker than what goes on out on the pitch, and that’s what we’ve seen over the last few months with Wilfried Zaha.
Back in September, fresh after the end of the summer transfer window and in the early days of the 2019/20 Premier League season, Zaha made headlines for something that doesn’t often happen in Premier League. The Ivorian sacked his agent after failing to get out of Selhurst Park.
According to The Times, Zaha wasn’t happy that Will Salthouse, his now-former agent, had failed to get him out of Palace. In the months since, though, the Palace superstar has acquired a new agent, namely Pini Zahavi, is attempting to broker a move for Zaha to leave Palace for Tottenham in January (The Mirror).
The issue with this potential deal isn’t down to the person representing Zaha, though. The problem lies in what Roy Hodgson and Steve Parish value Zaha at. The article in The Mirror claims that Spurs have no interest in going anywhere near Palace’s £80m valuation of the player, which gives the player’s new Israeli agent a tough task.
Hodgson has recently spoken out about Zaha saying:
‘We aren’t trying to sell Wilfried Zaha, we want to keep Wilfried Zaha.’
‘I have the assurance there is no one in the club that wants to sell Wilfried Zaha, but of course you never know where bids are going to come from and I suppose every time there is a serious bid for one of your players the board of directors needs to take it seriously.’
Will we have a big transfer window?
Yes
No
Regardless of these comments, there is still a lot that needs to happen for this deal to go ahead, and whilst Tottenham fans may not all be on board with the idea of signing the 27-year-old, it looks like his fate lies in the hands of Zahavi, Parish and the Tottenham board.