Wolves beat back Tottenham loan-to-buy offer for Adama Traore

Put the baby oil back on the shelf. According to the Telegraph, Tottenham Hotspur have had an offer for Adama Traore rejected in the past day.

Spurs had been working on a deal for Traore, a player with whom Nuno Espirito Santo loved working with from his years as Wolves manager, over the past week. There were transfer fees of £40m mooted, which seems like a lot for a swole dribble monster with an unproven record of finishing.

However, the Telegraph reports that Tottenham’s rejected offer was not a permanent signing this summer but a one year loan structured with an obligation to purchase Traore next summer. This is similar to the deal that brought Cristian Romero to Spurs this summer and is a favored deal by Managing Director of Football Fabio Paratici.

Traore is obviously a handful for defenders and there were suggestions he was eager to rejoin Nuno at Spurs, but he’s considered a key player at Wolves under Bruno Lage and they aren’t especially eager to let him go, especially after losing other key players like Diego Jota in the past couple of seasons.

So what does this mean for the future? Unclear. There’s less than a week to go before the transfer window closes, and this means that if Traore is Nuno’s guy, the Paratici will need to put up a significantly better offer in order to get him. No idea if this means Tottenham will move on to other targets or not, but I just want to point out, kindly, to Paratici and Nuno that Houssem Aouar is right there and likely available for less money than it would take to get Traore into a Spurs shirt. (If you can get him into a Spurs shirt at all, that dude is jacked.)