Mauricio Pochettino was left without the recognised striker he craved when Tottenham Hotspur’s efforts to prise Saido Berahino from West Bromwich Albion on transfer deadline day failed amid drama and anger.
Spurs had already had offers worth £18m and £22m for Berahino turned down, and it emerged that one of the packages had been structured around payments of £3.5m each year for five years, which had served to infuriate West Brom and their chairman, Jeremy Peace.
It should be noted fees from numerous deals in the modern game are spread over a period of years – Real Madrid, for example, are still paying back Tottenham for Gareth Bale’s £86m move to the Bernabéu in 2013.
The Tottenham chairman, Daniel Levy, came back for the England player in the hours before Tuesday’s 6pm deadline, making two further bids, according to Peace, but West Brom rejected them, leaving Berahino, who had submitted a written transfer request last week in an attempt to force the issue, beside himself with frustration. Tottenham insist their final offer was worth £25m – the long mooted price at which West Brom might consider a sale.
At 5pm, with the positions entrenched and emotions swirling, Berahino had taken to Twitter to suggest he did not intend to play again for Peace’s club. “Sad how i cant say exactly how the club has treated me but i can officially say i will never play Jeremy Peace,” Berahino wrote.
Tony Pulis is also bitterly upset. He omitted Berahino from the previous three matches – against Chelsea, Port Vale and Stoke City – as the West Brom manager deemed the player to be in the wrong frame of mind to concentrate on his football.
Pulis has seen no value in keeping an unhappy member of the squad and he must now find a way to remotivate Berahino. Furthermore, Pulis had wanted to take the central defender, Federico Fazio, from Tottenham and West Brom had made an offer worth £5m. That deal fell apart because of the ill feeling between Peace and Levy.
Peace made his fifth public statement on the Berahino affair on Tuesday evening and in it he once again hit out at Tottenham over how they have attempted to sign the player. He complained about Tottenham’s timing, their moves having come in the final weeks of the window and their valuations of Berahino.
“We have a key player who has been very unsettled by antics which were designed to get him out of our club cheaply,” Peace said. “Those tactics have continued despite my making our position clear in my first conversation with Daniel Levy on this subject in mid-August. I said selling Saido so late in the window was not on our agenda. We are now left with the task of repairing the damage created by this unfortunate episode.”
For their part, Tottenham say they initiated their move for Berahino well before mid-August and it was West Brom’s repeated public statements – including the one which divulged Berahino’s transfer request – that served to unsettle him at The Hawthorns.
Pochettino had made it clear he wanted another option up front and he will now have to rely on the recent signings, Clinton Njié and Son Heung-min, to support Harry Kane. Njié and Son are more renowned for playing off the flanks.
Pochettino still, technically, has Emmanuel Adebayor, after the striker, who is persona non grata at the club, failed to get the move to West Ham United that he wanted.
Adebayor demanded Tottenham pay up the final year of his contract – a sum of around £5m – before allowing him to move as a free agent. Levy refused to do so. It is unlikely Adebayor, who has lost his No10 shirt to Kane, will be reintegrated.
Tottenham also failed with an offer to Southampton for the midfielder Victor Wanyama, which was worth £20m and included either Érik Lamela or Andros Townsend on loan while they sold the winger Aaron Lennon to Everton for around £4m and loaned the full-back DeAndre Yedlin to Sunderland for the season.