Its likely that this won’t happen and it’s just his agent leaking fake interest trying to get him a new deal at Juve, especially since we briefed that we aren’t interested and the fact it’s not our style to blow that much money on one player.
But why do the Italian media keep running with our interest then? Surely once we briefed no interest the noise on this would die down, and if it was the agent leaking fake interest he’d stop?
And it’s not just one or two sources in Italy banging the Pjanic-City drum, it’s multiple well respected sources/journalists.
Theres a few things that makes me think there’s something going on here behind the scenes and that our press brief is not totally honest and just us trying to keep things quiet after the Jorginho nightmare:
1. We clearly need a deep lying midfielder. I’m sorry but there’s no way Pep is happy with ‘filling the position from within the squad’ when he was so keen to bring Jorginho in. I’m personally of the opinion that Gundogan can do a job there, but if Fern gets any sort of injury or form drop off I’m not so sure Gundo (or Delph, Gomes) could fill that role for any length of time. Pep and the club clearly knows this or they wouldn’t have bothered going for Jorginho in the first place. You don’t attempt to spend close to 50 mil on a player when you truthfully believe you have enough in the squad already.
2. Remember back to January, Alexis Sanchez had just fucked off to United and we thought we weren’t getting anyone. Then out of nowhere news started appearing that we were close to a deal for Mahrez. I remember I didn’t believe it at first but things picked up and it was clear that our interest was very genuine. Obviously things didn’t work out in January for Mahrez and I remember people calling it a ‘panic buy’ anyway just because we missed out on Sanchez. Then news started coming out that we’d actually made 3 or 4 bids for Mahrez during January, some of which came when we were still in the hunt for Alexis, our #1 target.
Now I’m someone who follows City Watch on Twitter pretty religiously. It keeps me entertained during the transfer window even though half the stories they relay turn out to be bullshit. But I do seem to remember a story they posted a month or two back stating we’d bid around 60 million for Pjanic. It came from an Italian source and most (including myself) brushed it off as complete rubbish because at the time we looked nailed on to sign Jorginho. It was also just a weird story as we’d barely been linked with anyone but Jorginho and Mahrez the whole window and it was an open secret they were our main and only 2 targets.
What if the Pjanic Story was true and it was a January, Mahrezesque type bid to test the waters on a potential backup target should Jorginho fall through?
Just strange because at the time everybody knew Jorginho was the one we wanted and a story about us bidding on Pjanic seemed ridiculous.
I do think there’s something in this Pjanic-City thing personally. Maybe it won’t happen and negotiations between us and Juve won’t come to anything, but I think there’s something going on behind the scenes that the UK press are being kept in the dark about until things get really serious.
Anyway essay over. Roll on next season, whatever happens happens!
