Negotiations between AC Milan and Monaco over Youssouf Fofana seem to have ground to a halt, but the French club are in a hurry to get his future resolved.
Di Marzio reported las night that Manchester United and Atletico Madrid have entered the race for Fofana and this has complicated things. The Monegasques are now asking for €35m to sell, which is nearly double the €18m demanded a few days prior.
According to Monica Colombo of Corriere della Sera (via Radio Rossonera), this is not the case at least as per Monaco’s version of events. They specify that they have not raised the price in the last few hours, but rather that they immediately clarified the demands for the player from the beginning.
Is the price fair? Monaco have seen that Khephren Thuram has just moved to Juventus from Nice, a club less prestigious than Monaco, for €20m plus bonuses and he is not even a regular for the French national team. Manuel Ugarte, coming off an up and down season, is worth €70m to PSG.
Thus, Monaco are going to hold out for what they believe is fair value. However, the 25-year-old has a deal which expires in 11 months and this does not give them a lot of leverage in negotiations with any club.
In addition to that, the Ligue 1 side would like the situation related to Fofana to be clear before August 1st. That is the day on which he is expected to arrive at the training camp having been granted a post-Euros vacation.
LOL. Comparing 2 players who are IN contract to a player who will be out of contract and can negotiate with clubs in 6 months are not the same thing. Milan will get this done for 22 Million including bonuses or they will get him in January for free.
Do your research. Thuram had one year left, and sold for 20M.
Personally I think Thurman is a better player with more upside. 18 is also close to 20 so no significant difference in price. Lastly save the 35 million for his contract next season. Maybe the answer is to see if Bene can do the job now that he’s not coming off a significant injury this year
So the media was trying to stir up drama where there is none and the club went on record to deny raising the price? Not a surprise at all. The 35m figure was fake news
Yeah it definitely was, it never made any sense.
But…can we just get this done now 😩
It’s always a drama when it comes to signing new players from anywhere for this Milan management.
No one like the way Moncada and Furlani do business.
If what Monaco say is true then why haven’t Milan signed Fonana already and leaving it to the last days to get the deal over the line?
Fonseca needs him foe the new season! They hired him with confidence to get the job done, then give him his player!
I do not believe Milan will get their much needed striker that is needed with this type of management.
Good luck Moncada and Furlani and Milan!
Is it so ?
From what I understood it’s more like Monaco is trying to make it look like they were asking for 35M€ from the get-go rather than 25M€.
Exactly how I understood too. They say they didn’t raise it but rather made it clear the price tag is 35 from the beginning. What a load of cráp.
DiMarzio specifically. Trying to drum up attention.
@Goku, and a lot of fans have been under 35m post, reason why I don’t like replying them. They act as if maybe they are new to media speculations. Well, we will sign the guy and I’m sure.
I think we’re getting him for 20+bonuses. Player wants Milan.
I think milan doesn’t pay that (market value 30m!!!). AC prefer to buy Samardzic for over 22m + 5m to the father (market value 20m).
Who should understand that. For 20-25m you have to buy Fofana, we need exactly this player. In Samardzic’s position, we have a lot of players.
Neither of the two have anything to do with each other.
We’re bored. We’re under every article. Most of us realise it’s all BS media speculation
Very dumb set of fans replying them is not worth it, once another news come out again the will out there act on display, disaster drumers.
Wow, some of you have zero reading comprehension:
“They specify that they have not raised the price in the last few hours, but rather that they immediately clarified the demands for the player from the beginning.“
They still want $35m…
Right. Claim they’ve been asking for that since jump, but who knows? 35m is too much for someone in last year of contract. If the price is firm I’d pass.
They didn’t raise the price at all. You’re the one not reading.
You’re mistaken. Kaka is saying they STILL want 35. As in they’ve always wanted 35, which is what their president is claiming in this article.
He’s wrong though. 35m is a figure invented by Di Marzio.
But then why cite Ugarte and Thuram? At first I read it as you did, but now I’m more convinced the article is precisely saying that they have always asked for 35M. Hence the comparisons to Ugarte and Thuram. Saying on the one hand that a player who had a mediocre season is valued at 70, while Thuram who is arguable a lesser player sold for 20M with one year of contract remaining. Of course, it’s madness from Monaco, but 18M does seem a bit too low. I think 25M is a happy medium, but the asking price does seem to be 35M.
They are saying that 35 mil is what was asked for from the start, the middle, to now, never in the first place agreed to the 18 mil that’s been reported and believed by almost all of us. So in some sense De Marzio’s 35 mil figure is not wrong, just that the figure never been dropped to be raised again.
Dude, some people are just dense haha.
Di Marzio is a reliable outlet for transfer news so I doubt it is entirely untrue.
Some odd game is being played on this transfer which tells me that Milan might dip out. If the player wants to go to Milan and sticks with that decision, then Milan has a chance.
I would stay away from commenting on any further news on this transfer. I am commenting on this because I believe some bs is happening behind the curtains.
I think
It’s the Zirkzee two-step in a different way. Monaco is asking for 35M, knowing the player is keen on Milan, but that Milan won’t pay it, in the hopes that Milan drops out and then Fofana will open to the PL and go there for 25-30M, which is more than the 18-20M they would have gotten from Milan.
I believe that, too. I guess they had a second thought about the whole thing, or, the backlash from football fans has made them take a step back. As long as the player insists on the club he wants, they will end up with nothing. Almost all the sports journals had the story, so, I believe there was some truth to it.
He his a true Gladiator, his words are solid. i want this team and that is it. same with Pavlovic unlike that moron called
Zirkzee.
i think highly of players who are ready for the next big challenge. i know they are pros and play for the bag but where is the passion and joy in the game then.
this team currently have a huge list of milanista and more reinforcements are coming.
Forza milan Forza Fonseca
All people knows that milan will wait till next year for free rather than to pay 35M.
Milan need Fofana and grab Andre Trindade from Fluminense before Fulham.Good defensive midfielder,cover a lot of space,ok price(20-25).Rios from Palmeiras is not even a starter,very overrated.
Andre is quality.
This article is misleading. Another article in this same website gets it right:
“This morning’s edition of Corriere della Sera (via Radio Rossonera) have lifted the lid on why the Ligue 1 club changed their demands, and the protagonist of the story is the Russian oligarch Dmitrij Rybolovlev, who has been the owner of Monaco since 2011.
Rybolovlev ‘reacted angrily’ for ‘not having been immediately involved in the negotiations’ with the Rossoneri, refusing Giorgio Furlani’s offer of €14m and raising the asking price quite substantially.
This ‘outburst’ regarding his demands is indeed because of the interest from United and Atletico, and the paper confirm that Rybolovlev is now asking for €35m to sell.”
The above is what is really going on.
However, with Fofana being in his last year, I find it unlikely that any club, including ManU and Atleti, will offer Monaco 35M.
So they will have to go down from their angry outburst or else they will lose the player for free.
It is true, however, that Milan should have paid 18 or 20 M several weeks ago; then, this would not have happened. And before negotiating with the player, indeed they should have talked with Monaco’s owner, avoiding this angry outburst. In this, our negotiators are indeed looking like amateurs, and are potentially losing a great deal (Fofana for 20 M was a great bargain and below market price for a very good player who we need now, not in one year, otherwise our midfield and defense will be weak again and we’ll be eaten alive by Inter and Juve).
There could be some truth to the price increase because the idiots at Man United paid €62 million for Yoro, despite the fact that he only had one year left on his contract. Real Madrid offered €25 million for Yoro, Man United then offered €62 million, Real Madrid weren’t prepared to get into a bidding war.
Some here would love to have idiots like those at Man U….
Not sure how Monaco is so much prestigious club, PSG I can accept, even Marseille, but Monaco? Come on…. Nice is not out of Monaco league. And the fact that the guy is going for zero euros in a year, well, that maybe is not a factor for them lol
They have chosen 0 euro the next summer and 18 million euros this summer. He is their player so yeah whatever they decide to do with him.
Why is there so much opinion that he’s not worth the money because he’s in the last year of his deal? Surely if the player has the value then it doesn’t matter to the buyer if he has one year or four years left on his deal, it only matters to the selling club.
Yes, Monaco have a risk of losing him for free, but his actual value to a club signing him shouldn’t make a difference – if he goes for free, he’ll just expect a higher salary and signing fee next year, it’s not like he’ll agree to whatever would be available to him this summer.
If you buy a canned food half of the usual price, what should you be expecting of from the food?
Exactly. It probably because the expiration date is near.
It’s a quite simple problem. It works that way from long ago.
Players has been taking advantage of their running out contracts to get a bigger deal from their current club too, simply because in this kind of condition the employer don’t have many leverage.
Wowza. So many transfer experts.
I knew the raise price news here since yesterday was all BS cos fabrizio romano never tweeted that
Every article on here contradicts the previous one. But it’s funny to watch all the haters use any excuse and baseless rumor to trash management.
The 35m was always nonsense, but the one thing that IS worth noting is that Fofana’s name is suddenly starting to crop up in the English press in the same sentence as Utd. Just like Zirkzee’s name started to do the same.
We need to close this one soon.
There’s a lot of criticism’on the Milan management, but I like the way they work. They first find and agreement with the player and tell him “if you really want to play for us, we will get the deal done” which is true if the player isn’t bluffing. If the player is bluffing, he’ll change his mind and sign for another club, but why would we want him at Milan? If the player isn’t bluffing, he’ll play for us eventually. Either now for the price we want to pay or in a year for free. It’s up to the player to convince his club that it’s Milan or nothing. Maybe we’ll miss out on a lot of players, but the management wants players who want to play for us. In the end it will pay off. That’s how you create champions. Who wants a player like Zirkzee that’ll always only be about the money? Either he’ll fail at Manchester and won’t have the will to fight for the team or he’ll succeed and wants to go to a bigger club after a good season. You don’t build a winning team with players like that.
“Maybe we’ll miss out on a lot of players, but the management wants players who want to play for us.”
No, the management wants to create a situation where the player will push his club to accept a lower transfer fee, that’s why we go for players before negociating with their clubs. Last season it more or less worked, for example Reijnders really wanted to play for us and had agreed with us, so AZ Alkmaar was kind of forced to let him go for a slightly lower fee, same with Chukwueze,…
But bear in mind most of these players come for smaller clubs, so going to Milan is for them a big leap in quality in terms of prestige (big club with 7UCLs, 19 serie A, wearing jerseys worn by legendary players,…) and also in terms of playing in high level (playing in UCL, fighting for top spot in serie A,…) and sometimes higher wage. It’s not like all of them are true rossoneris.
But this is a risky strategy, since we can miss many of our targets and have to settle for lower quality players sometimes. And it’s even more annoying when you know sometimes it came down to a difference of 2M€ or 3M€.
He is not leaving for 35 million with less than a year in his contract. Business just doesn’t work that way.
From the beginning their asking price 30m euro . ACM just try low ball them by make deal with player first and hoping that player pressing hard monaco to give massive discount thats make monaco owner angry, if you negotiate with monaco from beginning maybe you can get fofana for 20m euro + bonus 5m euro . This is remind me galliani try to low ball napoli with same trick like this for hamsik but fail to convince hamsik and make napoli president angry