Details Emerge Regarding N’Koudou’s Delay in Joining Tottenham
An easy transfer for Tottenham has proven difficult due to Marseille’s upper management shuffling people in and out.
The transfer saga circulating Tottenham, Olympique Marseille and Georges-Kévin N’Koudou has yet to be resolved but new details are finally emerging as to what the hold up is all about.
What started as a quick and smooth transfer, with a £10.8 million fee being agreed upon, the French winger agreeing to personal terms and a medical being completed three weeks ago, N’Koudou still has yet to join up with Spurs and has missed their entire pre-season training program and friendlies.
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It would be easy to pin the blame on Daniel Levy who has a knack for dragging out transfers each year in order to sign someone as cheaply as possible — even if the fee is already quite low for the Marseille player.
Or, Tottenham being reluctant to part ways with Clinton N’Jie who Mauricio Pochettino really likes and rates highly. All of this would point to the fact that Spurs are slowing things down to their indecisiveness, but that is not the case.
According to Lyall Thomas of Sky Sports, Marseille’s management was in a state of flux that had complicated everything for Tottenham to secure a player they’re interested in. Now that things have settled down, both clubs had to start renegotiate the transfer.
July 19th was the day that Georges-Kévin N’Koudou had passed his medical and agreed to terms to join Tottenham. It was also the same day that Clinton N’Jie agreed to go on a season-long loan and play in France once again.
But five days prior, Marseille’s president Vincent Labrune announced that he was resigning.
A longtime friend of owner Margarita Louis-Dreyfus and her late husband Robert, the 45-year-old witnessed poor results and murmurs going on behind the scenes for Les Olympiens.
It was enough for him to step down and eventually be replaced by Giovanni Ciccolunghi by Louis-Dreyfus. This is important to note because a shift in power from the former French president to the current Italian chairman could change how they deal with transfers.
Tottenham are no strangers when it comes to revamping their transfer committee after Franco Baldini was essentially replaced by Paul Mitchell in November 2014. It’s to be expected that this could happen with Marseille.
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Moving on though, with the Ligue 1 club losing a talented player in N’Koudou, Marseille coach, Franck Passi, was seeking a replacement and quickly targeted Clinton N’Jie.
As stated above, there was some back and forth with Spurs and if they truly wanted to send the Cameroon winger back to France after just one season with the north London club following a knee injury that saw him miss significant time.
Eventually, Tottenham agreed to a move and N’Jie applied for a visa. Everything was moving along before Marseille’s transfer committee and management was shaken up.
Remember how a shift in power tends to affect how transfers are viewed? That’s exactly what happened. Here’s a brief section from Lyall Thomas’ article explaining everything in detail:
"On July 23, Marseille announced their new president; the Italian businessman Giovanni Ciccolunghi, who was head of Adidas in Russia for a decade. They also appointed a new sporting director from Belgian club Genk, Gunter Jacob, as well as several new members to the Marseille board, and all wanted to review the N’Koudou/ N’Jie deal.Tottenham had hoped to get the deals done before they flew to France but, two days later on July 25, they were on the plane complete with ‘de facto’ sporting director Rebecca Caplehorn, who is instrumental in every Spurs transfer deal.A 15-hour time difference between chairman Daniel Levy in Florida, the players in Europe, and Spurs in Melbourne added extra difficulty to what had now become a renegotiation. Marseille’s new president has been charged by the owner with restoring the club’s business credibility and they wanted additions made to the deal."
Basically what all of this means is that a completed deal with Marseille’s former president Vincent Labrune needed to get reworked, because Giovanni Ciccolunghi and the rest of Les Olympiens’ new sporting director and board members are making sure this deal will help their club out.
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It makes sense that Marseille’s new management is redoing a transfer deal that the old management started, but having to sit back and wait three weeks will potentially make the signing of Georges-Kévin N’Koudou become the new Clinton N’Jie and Son Heung-Min.
Meaning, N’Jie and Son didn’t get to take part in Tottenham’s pre-season training program last summer and never got a pre-season friendly under their belts. It’s difficult to correlate missing pre-season training and friendlies with suffering injuries and starting off slowly, but that’s exactly what happened to two of Spurs’ offensive signings last season.
The same thing could happen once N’Koudou finally joins Tottenham. Whenever that will happen and at this pace it could be after Spurs’ season opener.