Conor Gallagher has yet to be announced as an Atletico Madrid player, but the deal is done, and after a long and dreary saga his move is finally apparently done.
It almost got longer and even messier, at least according to some pretty jaw dropping quotes from Valencia sporting director Miguel Angel Corona. In Spain it’s quite common for sporting directors to speak to the press, meaning you get some interesting stuff like this coming out.
According to Corona, Atletico had tried to back out of the Gallagher deal late on as they found a better option in his player, Javi Guerra.
A €25m move for Guerra, which had an additional €5m in bonuses plus a 25% of future fee clause, looked juicy for Valencia as they lined it up over the weekend. However, come Wednesday they still hadn’t heard from Atletico, and started to worry something was up.
Chaos in Spain
“There was an agreement on Sunday between Lay Hoon Chan and the largest shareholder of Atletico Madrid [Miguel Angel Gil Marin], documentation is being filled out with the player. And on Wednesday morning, given the delay in the return of documents, there is a question towards Atletico Madrid, what is the situation and they tell us that they are trying to get out of Chelsea’s operation with Gallagher,” Football Espana quote Corona as saying.
“Atletico and we agreed on that agreement on Sunday, on Monday in the face of certain journalistic information, we asked and they themselves told us to be calm that they were trying to get out of that operation, that their objective was only Javi Guerra. The Wednesday the largest shareholder apologises, show us understanding and tell us that he also wanted to get out of the deal, they apologise to us because they know what their actions have been.”
So Gallagher’s messy exit from Chelsea has become a messy entry at Atletico Madrid, who ended up paying us €40m for him and leaving poor Guerra without a foot to stand on.
