Tottenham set to pull ol’ loan-to-permanent move yet again
By Ryan Wrenn
Moussa Sissoko appears set to leave Tottenham on loan in the coming season in a move that should presage his eventual permanent exit from the club.
Turkish Superliga side Trabzonspor are rumored to put pen to paper for Tottenham’s record signing sometime before the transfer window closes, according to the Sun.
Such business is becoming a very familiar trope in Mauricio Pochettino’s Spurs.
Unwanted or disused players often find themselves on loan move that double as auditions for an eventual sale. After cutting so much dead weight in his first two seasons at the club, Pochettino has come to rely on this process to offload players that might not otherwise sell themselves by virtue of their accomplishments with Spurs.
By any reckoning, Pochettino’s gambit is working. Already this summer Spurs completed three such loan-to-permanent moves, with Nabil Bentaleb joining Schalke, Clinton Njie joining Olympique de Marseille and Federico Fazio joining Roma.
Indeed, under Pochettino this has proved to be the only use of the loan system thus far. Despite plenty of players coming up through the Academy or idling on the bench, Pochettino prefers to keep the most talented among them close to home.
Harry Winks, Cameron Carter-Vickers and Kyle Walker-Peters all regularly find themselves at the center of gushing praise for their promise, yet to date none have featured for a club besides Tottenham.
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Others, however, aren’t so highly regarded. Sissoko was the subject of perhaps the very definition of a panic buy in the dying hours of last summer’s transfer window. Daniel Levy willingly parted with £30 million for the Newcastle midfielder — the most ever spent by the club on a single player.
It was a lesson learned the hard way over the course of the entire 2016/17 season. Despite his hefty fee, Pochettino clearly never intended for Sissoko to be a starter or displace any of the team that finished in third place the season before. He was destined to be a particularly shiny bench player.
Even by those low standards, Sissoko must still be considered a failure. He started eight matches in the Premier League last season and came on as a substitute another 17 times. Over those 903 minutes of football, he scored no goals and set up only two others.
We could step away and ignore, for the moment, such vital statistics. How was his off-the-ball movement? Did he stretch play? Was he occupying defenders and thereby open space for his teammates to thrive?
Nope. He rarely put himself in dangerous areas, lacked the pace to keep up with quick transitions and generally got carried by the other 10 Spurs players on the pitch.
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A brief flash of hope came at the end of the season, when Pochettino put Sissoko at wing-back following injuries to both Kyle Walker and Kieran Trippier. He was marginally better in that area, but clearly not enough to convince Spurs to keep hold of him.
No loan move is yet confirmed, but it always seemed the most likely course for Sissoko. He was kept home from Spurs’ tour of the United States, and doesn’t look likely to participate in Saturday’s final friendly against Juventus.