The winter transfer window is on the brink of opening and Tottenham Hotspur have dead weight which they could afford to shift.
In years gone by, Tottenham Hotspur have shifted quite a number of first-team figures off their books in the January transfer window.
Jermaine Jenas, Jermain Defoe, Andros Townsend, Tom Carroll and Kyle Naughton are some of the mid-season exits that chairman Daniel Levy has sanctioned in North London in recent memory.
And with January just around the corner, HITC Sport looks at three departures which the Tottenham supremo could and should instigate this time around.
Danny Rose
Danny Rose is a brilliant left-back, but if Manchester United are willing to pay £50 million for him then Tottenham should snatch their hand off in January, if the alternative means keeping him and opening the door for yet another transfer saga involving a Manchester club during summer. The 27-year-old does not come across as a figure unquestionably committed to the North London side and if he wants to leave, why not get it over with and offload him next month rather than wait for the summer?
If Spurs have another trophyless season, which looks distinctly possible, then it ramps up the possibility of players leaving next summer. Real Madrid will target Hugo Lloris if the Lilywhites don’t win anything according to The Sun, while Toby Aldweireld, out of contract in 2020, is yet to sign a new deal.
Levy is no stranger to losing big players in the final week of the transfer window – Dimitar Berbatov, Luka Modric and Gareth Bale, for example – and do Tottenham really want to grace their new stadium for the first time against the backdrop of unsettling rumours about their best players? No, and Rose, if he stays past January, is surely going to be a focus of intense speculation in the summer and the less of that, the better.
Moussa Sissoko
Like a couple going through tough times, Mauricio Pochettino and Moussa Sissoko have tried to make it work at Tottenham but it just hasn’t. The Spurs boss has even tried to spice things up by giving the Frenchman a central midfield role at times this season but, eighteen months on from his big-money move from Newcastle, Sissoko remains a £30 million player in name only and it’s time for separate ways.
It being a World Cup year, the 28-year-old, who has started eight Premier League games this season, needs as much football and form as possible to get a seat on the plane to Russia, but he is unlikely to find either in rich supply during the second half of the season if he stays. Contracted until 2021, Levy would still be in a good position to demand a sizeable fee – especially with his reputation for negotiations – but his value is only going to decrease. Now is the time to sell.
Fernando Llorente
It took Fernando Llorente 17 games to break his duck at Tottenham and, at the moment, he does not look like the huge upgrade on Vincent Janssen that Spurs fans thought they were getting after the club spent £12 million on bringing him from Swansea City on deadline day.
Of course, Tottenham don’t need a world-class striker in the system that they play, because they already have one in Harry Kane, but they do need an excellent plan-b option for those rare occasions in which Kane isn’t scoring and Llorente has a lot to do prove that he is that option.
You couldn’t blame Pochettino if he decided to offload the Spaniard next month and sign someone better, someone younger.
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