Sunday news (includes West Ham)

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Thanks Alan 2:34 Sun Aug 4

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[Alan]

"BBC Atletico Madrid are in discussions with Manchester City over a move for their Argentina forward Julian Alvarez, 24. (Athletic - subscription required) Arsenal are also considering a move for World Cup winner Alvarez, but the Gunners may have to make further sales to fund his purchase. (Mirror) Newcastle are hoping to make a transfer breakthrough with a deal for England and Crystal Palace defender Marc Guehi, 24. (Mail) Palace have told Newcastle that they want at least £50m up front as well as add-ons to sell Guehi. (Football Insider) Bournemouth are insistent that Tottenham will have to meet their £65m release clause if they are to sign England forward Dominic Solanke, 26, this summer. (Mirror) The Cherries have targeted Aston Villa and England Under-21 forward Cameron Archer, 22, as a potential replacement for Solanke. (Teamtalk) RB Leipzig have warned Barcelona they will need to improve the terms around their bid of 61m euros (£51.8m) for Spain midfielder Dani Olmo, 26, to conclude a deal. (90 min) Juventus are closing in on Nice and France central defender Jean-Clair Todibo, 24, who has previously been linked with Manchester United and West Ham. (La Gazzetta dello Sport - in Italian) Juventus will return to Atalanta with an increased bid of around 55m euros for Netherlands midfielder Teun Koopmeiners, 26. (Corriere dello Sport - in Italian) Arsenal want £30m plus a sell-on clause included in any deal to sell England international Eddie Nketiah, 25, with Marseille chasing the forward. (Fabrizio Romano) Liverpool are keen to complete a £13m deal with Lanus for Argentina youth international left-back Julio Soler, who they view as a long-term replacement for Scotland defender Andrew Robertson, 30. (Sun) Jean-Philippe Mateta, 27, is keen to sign a new deal with Crystal Palace amid interest from RB Leipzig and Napoli in the French forward. (Sun) Southampton are hopeful they will be able to keep defender Kyle Walker-Peters, 27, at the club this summer after West Ham pulled out of talks to sign him. (Football Insider) Former Aberdeen defender Scott McKenna could be on his way to La Liga side Las Palmas. The 27-year-old centre back was released by Nottingham Forest this summer. (Sun ) Liverpool are looking for at least £12m to even consider selling midfielder Bobby Clark, 19, who is being eyed by Red Bull Salzburg, Norwich and Leeds. (Athletic - subscription required) Sky Paper Talk THE SUN Liverpool are ready to join the bidding battle for England star Marc Guehi. Jean-Philippe Mateta is angling for a new contract at Crystal Palace as his reputation soars. Liverpool want left-back Julio Soler and see him as Andy Robertson's long-term replacement. Liverpool are stalling on a decision on young attacker Jayden Danns, who is wanted by Wayne Rooney at Plymouth. Arsenal are reportedly monitoring Julian Alvarez after the Manchester City dropped a big hint about his future. Jude Bellingham waved at fans as he rocked up at Bradford's Valley Parade to watch his little brother Jobe in action. Bayern are refusing to budge over Manchester United's twin targets Matthijs de Ligt and Noussair Mazraoui. Cristian Romero insists he is targeting trophy success at Tottenham despite being linked with Real Madrid. Southampton boss Russell Martin is hoping his relationship with Celtic's Matt O'Riley will win the race for his signature. Hull are looking into a shock move for veteran keeper Vito Mannone - 12 seasons after his second loan spell with the Tigers. Jamie Vardy's injury is stopping Leicester from loaning out Tom Cannon. SUNDAY TIMES Atletico Madrid's Joao Felix will not be returning to Benfica this summer, with Aston Villa still interested in the Portugal forward though not the only Premier League side keeping an eye on the 24 year-old. DAILY EXPRESS Tottenham have reportedly been told they will need to match Dominic Solanke's £65m release clause if they wish to sign the Bournemouth striker this summer. Liverpool could pocket themselves a healthy £10m in additional transfer funds if Tottenham secure the signature of Solanke. Cristiano Ronaldo has been spotted dabbling in a new sport outside of the world of football, as he takes up padel. The Portuguese star has been seen playing a few matches with long-time friend Miguel Paixao, who he has known since his Sporting days. DAILY MIRROR Eddie Nketiah's proposed move to Marseille has taken a twist after the French giants reportedly opened talks with Borussia Dortmund over a loan-to-buy swoop for Youssoufa Moukoko. Liverpool boss Arne Slot has already contacted Darwin Nunez to tell the Uruguayan striker he wants him to be the frontman for his Reds' revolution. Wolves want to tie boss Gary O'Neil to a new long-term deal before the start of the Premier League season. Fiorentina are thinking about handing David de Gea a lifeline deal. Joshua Zirkzee has revealed how Manchester City legend Vincent Kompany helped him to become good enough for Manchester United. Brighton are set to pip West Ham to the £15m signing of Paraguay star Diego Gomez. Norwich City midfielder Gabriel Sara is set to join Turkish giants Galatasaray. DAILY MAIL Atletico Madrid have started negotiations with Manchester City over a possible deal for Julian Alvarez - and PSG are interested too. Pep Guardiola says he will try to make his half-time team talks shorter after Manchester City were fined £2m for late kick-offs by the Premier League. Liverpool are preparing to make big calls on the futures of a number of their young stars - with Bobby Clark among the players who could leave. Louis van Gaal has provided a positive update on his fight with prostate cancer and revealed he was approached by a big European club to become their manager. DAILY RECORD Adam Idah received a frosty reception on his return to action for Norwich City on Saturday - as links over a return to Celtic on a permanent basis continue to swirl. Rapid Bucharest boss Neil Lennon has returned home to attend to a family emergency. John Fleck has revealed he's dreaming of a return to Rangers as his heart remains with his boyhood club. SCOTTISH SUN ON SUNDAY Chelsea have joined Celtic star Matt O'Riley's growing list of admirers. The Athletic The making of West Ham’s Crysencio Summerville – ‘He has the fire inside him’ By Nancy Froston and Phil Hay This article was originally published in April and has been updated after Crysencio Summerville completed a move from Leeds United to West Ham United. The golden rule for guaranteeing the maverick, game-changing performances Crysencio Summerville brought to Leeds United last season was simple: “Don’t kill him with a plan.” Summerville is an unscripted genius with the ball at his feet. The Championship Player of the Season, who has joined West Ham United for about £25 milion, dribbled, dummied and delivered performances worthy of making him the star of Daniel Farke’s side last season. The scariest thing for opponents? He has more to learn. The 22-year-old Dutchman cannot be bound by defensive blocks or dispirited by cynical fouls and has the potential to be world-class. Summerville’s story is one of belief that started in the youth teams of RVV Noorderkwartier and has taken him from the south of Rotterdam to east London. Certain conditions are needed to create a player like Summerville. An absence of pressure, a focus on finding joy in the sport and coaches smart enough to know the needs of the individual. All of those factors came together for a young Summerville in his education at the academy of Dutch football side Feyenoord, whom he joined as an under-seven in 2008. “I first coached him when he was 12 in the under-13s but I knew him from when he was eight or nine,” says Gaston Taument, one of Summerville’s academy coaches at Feyenoord. “He was a typical, classical wide winger. He has a very good family. They’re very close. Every game, every training session, tournament, away game; they were everywhere. If we play in other countries, in Italy with the youth, they would be there. “One of the good things is this: I’ve trained for 20 years with youth teams and one of the problems is the parents who shout at their kids, who make their kids like a king. It’s a dream of the parents — mostly the father — to have a kid who becomes a professional player. Crysencio’s father was always quiet. When Crysencio was the best player in a tournament, won prizes or played very well, his father was the same. He was calm and he had a distance. No pressure — no pressure from the family at all.” Summerville grew up in the south of Rotterdam in an area described by those close to the player as a tough neighbourhood. With Summerville being slight but technical, it is some luck that the winger progressed through youth football in the Netherlands where academies are less concerned with a player’s size if they show talent. His time at Feyenoord’s Varkenoord training complex saw him work with former Netherlands and Liverpool legend Dirk Kuyt in the under-19s, where Summerville progressed well despite never making a senior appearance. “Through the whole academy, he played wide so I was very surprised he made a good development in the last year (with Leeds) a little bit more behind the striker, like a No 10, and also playing on the left,” Taument says. “Here, he was always on the right side, in a 4-3-3 — always very wide, one against one, very dominant in those situations. “He’s been a very good player from the start but he was also little. Everybody was a big fan because he was very technical but he wasn’t so strong. But in Holland, it doesn’t matter so much. The first thought is about technique: how good is it? And Crysensio had a lot of it, very technical. “I worked with him a lot. When we were training — and this is how it is sometimes because kids are kids — he could be a bit lazy. He knows I would say that about him. The guys trained four times a week, we wanted focus and effort 100 per cent. Sometimes, he would train on 70 per cent. You could see it, you knew it was happening.” If there were questions about Summerville’s application in training, they did not apply on matchdays. Then, he had only one gear: all in, 100 per cent effort. With big talents, Taument says, “you have to treat them a bit differently”. That was enough to satisfy youth coaches at Feyenoord while they worked on other aspects of his game but they knew that would be tested as soon as he stepped into a first-team environment. As he learned in his loan spell with Dordrecht at 17, there is nowhere to hide in senior football. “I didn’t find him lazy,” says Claudio Braga, who coached Summerville during his loan spell with second-tier Dordrecht. “Maybe this was exactly why he made the step from Feyenoord. There, he was with his same-age team-mates, but not with me. With me, he was training with 27-year-old colleagues. The dressing room is a different vibe. Video meetings are a different vibe. It was a really good stimulant. “With us, every Friday or Saturday, he was playing in front of 12,000, 15,000, 22,000 people in the stadium. So it is very different. Dordrecht is not the same club as Feyenoord but, in the end, the games were at a higher level and speed than the youth games. There are more people there, television is there. For him, it was a good decision.” Once he was handed his first start, Summerville needed just six minutes to score his first goal for Dordrecht against Jong PSV. His 18 appearances in the loan spell set him up well for the next step in his career: a loan move to Eredivisie side ADO Den Haag the following season. The step up to the Netherlands’ top division reinforced what Summerville had found throughout his career: as a technical, less physical player, he was more likely to get kicked when defenders could not stop him. “He was quick to get disappointed,” says Taument of his early years at Feyenoord. “If he didn’t get the ball, or if he had a defender always kicking him, it could make him angry. Other teams knew him and knew what kind of player he was. So, yeah, they would kick him. He’d yell at the referee. Some of them helped him, some of them didn’t. Some of them did nothing.” “He was a very nice lad to work with, very ambitious,” adds Alfons Groenendijk, who coached Summerville at Den Haag. “We spent a lot of time with him, we gave him his debut in Eredivisie, which is a tough league. We had to be careful because he was becoming a man but he came in as a boy. We spoke a lot — sometimes, we would sit down and have a drink but he would be a bit shy. “He’s a very nice one to work with and he wanted to invest in himself, so we tried to make him stronger. He got kicked in the Dutch league so we had to be careful with him. He didn’t play in every game and sometimes we had to protect him, but he made big steps and everyone could see his talent, his skills. He was very fast and his dribbling was good. He was starting to score goals too. Even then, we could see that he was something special.” The “something special” Summerville brings is his ability to change games from wide areas and when dribbling in one-on-one situations. If there was any criticism to be made of his efforts last season at Leeds, it was that his team-mates too often looked to him to create something from nothing — but to Summerville, that is familiar territory. “There was one game in front of Twente,” says former Dordrecht coach Braga. “It was in front of 30,000 supporters. It was a show to see him play as he did. It’s not because I worked with him that I’m a fan of him and like him very much. When defenders are compact, in a strong block, you see as a coach that you can have a great plan, you can train well but to find a solution, to break the wall, you need someone like Summerville. “It was the balance for me as a manager — I need players who follow a plan, who have brains, who are playmakers, leaders. But I also need one or two guys who, when you need to force something, have the courage and the technique to do it. He was that guy. “It’s true, he has a lot of self-confidence. I like to see the body language and look into the eyes of players, see their confidence. The volume of their voice tells you something, too. Crysencio with me was always in balance. He would say to me, ‘Coach, I’m going to fix this’.” Summerville’s confidence was crucial in the run-in for Leeds as they chased promotion before losing to Southampton in the Championship play-off final, with boss Farke noting that his and Georginio Rutter’s lively personalities made for a good dressing-room dynamic. The evolution in Summerville’s game from an out-and-out winger to a player capable of thriving in the No 10 position has impressed his former coaches, who have remained in contact with him since he departed from Feyenoord for Leeds in 2020. “What fascinates me more this year is that I see him playing and finding solutions in the centre of the field,” says Braga. “With us he was more of a winger, always on the line, dribbling vertically. But the speed and his power in the one-against-one, it doesn’t matter if he’s on the side, up front, in behind. It’s what makes him special. We were all looking for consistency for him and, if he can keep it, maybe one day make a jump to the top in the world. “It’s up to him but any manager who works with him must not kill the talent. Give him space to find solutions and show his quality. He needs to feel the confidence to do his thing in an attacking way. That gives you the power and the strength, everything in his character.” Signed under Marcelo Bielsa, Summerville’s Leeds career was a slow burn, with his appearances and contributions to the team growing each season. He obliterated his personal best of four goals in 28 games — achieved as Leeds struggled in the Premier League in the 2022-23 season — to thrive under Farke alongside Rutter, another talented 22-year-old. The pair combined frequently for goals, using the drop to the Championship to better establish themselves and thrive. Summerville has not forgotten his roots, with each former coach who spoke to The Athletic noting they remain in touch with the player and monitor his progress. His application and maturity in recent seasons have seen him reach new heights and a commitment to an extended pre-season schedule before the start of last campaign paid off. If Feyenoord had the chance again, they would not allow Summerville to leave for as little as the reported £1.25million ($1.6m at current rates) that Leeds paid for him four years ago. After another brace in a crucial win against Middlesbrough to keep Leeds, it was hard to see how Farke’s side would have been fighting at the top of the Championship table without his contributions. Summerville’s second goal of the 4-3, a cut in from the wing and curled shot, has become his trademark — effectively, as one person close to the player, called it, “doing the Arjen Robben”. “The potential is there to achieve big things,” Braga says. “He has the quality and fire inside him. I also believe a lot in his decisions in the future: what kind of manager will work for him, what kind of club is good for him, what will be the environment? I see a lot of boys that are destroyed because they try to make robots of them. They don’t give freedom to this kind of player. Managers only want them to follow plans. “If he can always have the people around him that fit with his personality and his mind, then he can achieve at the top.” Caught Offside West Ham plot bargain move for two-time Champions League winner West Ham United are keen on signing the former Barcelona utility man Sergi Roberto. The 32-year-old is currently a free agent after his contract with Barcelona expired last month. West Ham are hoping to snap him up on a free transfer and it remains to be seen whether they can get the deal done. According to Football Insider, West Ham want to add more quality and experience to the dressing room and they have identified the former Spanish international as a target. Roberto is a proven performer at the highest level, and he has been a key player for Barcelona over the years. He is versatile enough to play in the midfield as well as a full-back. His experience and leadership qualities could prove to be invaluable additions to the West Ham dressing room as well. Sergi Roberto could have a galvanising effect The Hammers will be hoping to push for domestic trophies next season and they will look to secure European qualification as well. The former Barcelona player will certainly help them improve on and off the pitch. He has won multiple major trophies throughout his career including seven league titles and two Champions League trophies. He has the experience of competing in big games regularly. West Ham could use a leader like him next season. Although the versatile Spaniard is in the twilight stages of his career, he could prove to be a good addition in the short term. Meanwhile, Roberto has proven himself in La Liga over the years and the opportunity to move to the Premier League could be quite exciting for him. West Ham have an ambitious project and they have appointed a quality manager like Julen Lopetegui. Roberto could be tempted to join them if a suitable offer is presented. The Hard Tackle West Ham United could launch late move for Carlos Soler West Ham United might make a late move to sign frustrated 27-year-old Spanish midfielder Carlos Soler from Paris Saint-Germain before the summer transfer window shuts down. According to the reliable Ex WHU Employee, as relayed by West Ham Central, Carlos Soler is the subject of interest from West Ham United. The Hammers are keen on bolstering their midfield department in the summer transfer window. And they might launch a late move to sign the frustrated 27-year-old Paris Saint-Germain midfielder. Carlos Soler and PSG frustrations Carlos Soler has seen his progress slow down since joining Paris Saint-Germain from Valencia in September 2022. The move came out of nowhere, and it was surprising, considering PSG had a stacked midfield department, which also consisted of Vitinha, Marco Verratti, and Fabian Ruiz, among others. While the Spaniard has won two Ligue 1 titles with PSG, he has not been a regular starter for Les Parisiens in the middle of the park. The 27-year-old has not even racked up 3,000 minutes of game time in two seasons with PSG, turning out 63 times while chipping in with eight goals and eight assists. While Carlos Soler’s stock has fallen, he remains popular in the transfer market midway through the summer transfer window. The Spanish international might soon head to the Premier League, with a few clubs, including Aston Villa, already showing interest in him. However, West Ham United might look to beat the competition to his signature. Premier League adventure on the horizon? West Ham United’s interest in Carlos Soler is understandable. The Hammers have been active in the market throughout the summer transfer window thus far, signing three players. In addition, Guido Rodriguez and Niclas Fullkrug are closing in joining West Ham in the coming days. However, the Hammers are not done yet, as they are keen on bolstering their midfield unit in the coming days. So, they have set their sights on Soler, with the PSG midfielder a viable target to replace Lucas Paqueta, who faces an uncertain future amid his betting scandal. Soler has thus emerged as a viable target for West Ham, although they will unlikely launch the offensive to sign the frustrated 27-year-old PSG midfielder until the final days of the summer transfer window."