Jose Mourinho’s Spurs and Brendan Rodgers’ Leicester City reportedly want Southampton ace Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg this summer.
Southampton captain Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg has emerged as Tottenham Hotspur’s top summer target, according to The Mirror (6 March, page 62), with Leicester City also big fans of the Denmark international.
With The Saints determined to shed their ‘selling club’ tag, this feels like a big summer at St Mary’s. And keeping hold of Hojbjerg, amid interest from a number of Premier League rivals, would represent a massive statement of intent for a side who have cashed in on their star men on an annual basis in recent years.
The former Bayern Munich starlet is out of contract in 2021, putting Southampton in a rather awkward position. To make matters worse, Hojbjerg recently joined forces with Pini Zahavi, the super-agent renowned for his ability to make big-money moves happen.
The Mirror reports that Leicester are already eyeing up a summer deal for the £12.8 million midfielder while Jose Mourinho’s Spurs have identified him as their top priority for the off-season. Not that Ralph Hasenhuttl has given up on his desire to keep hold of a Scandinavian star.
“I am confident everybody wants to stay with a successful team and with a successful club and a club that shows a clear direction,” the Southampton boss told the Daily Echo when asked about Hojbjerg’s future.
“Every player likes to play in such a club. It is about us to decide and him to decide. We have some good things to offer.
“We have some good targets to offer in terms of what we want to win in the next few years, so we will have the right conversations with everybody.”
Tottenham’s struggles in the centre of the park have been well documented of late with the North London giants losing four consecutive games in all competitions for the first time since 2004.
Neither Harry Winks nor Giovani Lo Celso look a natural in a deep-lying role while Tanguy Ndombele and Moussa Sissoko have spent far more time on the sidelines than Mourinho would have liked.
So could Hojbjerg be the ‘positional midfielder’, the metronomic number six, that Mourinho is crying out for?
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