Manchester City hold fresh talks to sell Carlos Tevez to Milan
• Milan want loan with guaranteed sale for £17m
• City want straight sale and around £25m
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Daniel Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 December 2011 20.05 GMT
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Roberto Mancini wants to see the back of Carlos Tevez, right, who has been on strike in Argentina since early November. Photograph: Jason Cairnduff/Action Images
Manchester City have held fresh talks with Milan to try to reach a compromise that will allow the Premier League leaders to remove Carlos Tevez from their payroll.
A delegation from Milan visited Manchester on Thursday for both sides to outline what they regard as acceptable for a player who has been on strike since flying to Argentina on 8 November. Milan have proposed an initial loan arrangement and are hoping to persuade City by writing in a clause that guarantees a permanent deal of around £17m at the end of the season. However, City have been adamant that they want a straight sale and the chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, is holding out for a figure in the region of £25m.
Juventus have also asked about Tevez, in the form of several telephone calls from Pavel Nedved, now a director of the Turin club, to the City manager, Roberto Mancini, and an inquiry to the player's adviser, Kia Joorabchian. However, Paris St-Germain's interest has gone cold and Milan are making the clearest attempts to negotiate a deal.
The negotiations began at 2.30pm on the day that Manchester city council approved the club's plans to develop a new training ground and youth development centre on an 80-acre site opposite the Etihad Stadium. The work, scheduled to be completed in three to four years, will cost City at least £100m but give them the best training facilities in the league. The Etihad Campus will include 15 full-size pitches and a 7,000-seat stadium for their elite-development squad and will cater for up to 400 young players, with on-site sleeping accommodation, a rehab centre, education facilities, a media centre and office blocks.
The plans were submitted after City's project team embarked on a research study that saw them visit 30 elite sports development centres in nine countries, including the Australian Institute of Sport, the LA Lakers, the Nike laboratories in Oregon, the New York Giants and Barcelona. Sir Richard Leese, the council leader, said the new development would be a "world-class sporting facility."