On Thursday, the news broke that Manchester United are ready to thwart their cross-town rivals Manchester City, in their bid to land Arsenal star Alexis Sanchez. On Friday, United manager Jose Mourinho met the media, and he would not rule out the idea of signing the Chilean.
In discussing the topic, Mourinho heaped so much praise on the Gunners forward that he implicitly confirmed the reports by multiple outlets that United are in fact in the race to acquire his signature.
Mourinho told his weekly news conference today:
“I don’t know ethical or correct, the word we can find to be speaking about players of other clubs, if somebody speaks of one of my players to say we are interested, I wouldn’t be very very happy.”
“Sanchez is an Arsenal player, I don’t know but probably this weekend he is going to defend Arsenal colors, so I don’t think it’s correct to say things about Alexis Sanchez.”
“At the general level what I can say is myself and Manchester United board, owners, we don’t believe a lot in the January market we don’t believe in sign a player just to sign a player, just to do something we don’t believe in that, what we believe really is there are some players in football world if you have the chance to sign them in January, March or July, you have to try and that’s it.
“But in relation to Alexis Sanchez I don’t say a word. The only word I can say is he is a phenomenal player, apart from that Arsenal player and I feel I shouldn’t say much more than this.”
Mourinho won’t say more beyond that, nor should he. It’s definitely against his own interests to talk Alexis Sanchez up more, but club legend Phil Neville said that adding Sanchez would be a coup, on par with the signing of Eric Cantona back in the day.
The latest reports on this transfer situation claim that City won’t spend above £20 million f0r the Gunners forward, while United are prepared to go £25 million, plus giving the player himself better per week salary.
Watch this space between now and the next 19 days.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes regularly to WGN CLTV and the Tribune company’s blogging community Chicago Now.
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