Ruben Amorim is taking a Sporting press conference right now, and he was of course asked to address yesterday’s rumours which were all over the front pages of Portugal’s sports papers.
The claims were that Chelsea had launched an €85m bid to sign Victor Gyokeres, Sporting’s Swedish striker. So far the party line from the Lions has been clear: Gyokeres will stay until someone pays his €100m release clause. So while Amorim did seem initially to confirm there had been a bid, he didn’t consider for a moment a move might happen:
“Obviously, I was informed of the news. As soon as they said it was €85m, I thought: ‘that’s not enough’. It’s only €100m [that would be accepted]. I’m not worried.” (A Bola)
That certainly makes it sounds like the “news” he got was from someone inside the club informing him of an official bid. But his follow up suddenly made it sound more like he had just seen the papers like the rest of us:
“I doubt there’s been an offer. I’d be informed, I believe. I don’t believe it was true. €85m is far from our value.”
So in fact, the denials from Chelsea yesterday that there had been a bid seem to have been correct, while Amorim and Sporting are just using this chance to reinforce their stance of “come and get him for €100m.”
There will be plenty more chatter around this for a couple of weeks, then likely a major move in the summer. Unless Chelsea make a huge sale this month, we don’t expect one of their top striker targets to come in.
