Report: Late drama as Barcelona could GAZUMP Tottenham for Adama Traore

(Please forgive the headline, I couldn’t resist, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m trying to de...)

Because nothing at Tottenham Hotspur is ever easy and God hates us for reasons unfathomable to mere mortals, there may now be a reason why we haven’t had a real update on Spurs’ move for Adama Traore in a few days. That reason is this: Barcelona is now interested.

Run that through the Google machine and you get this, approximately:

Watch out. Adama Traore is taking his time and isn’t finalizing his move to Tottenham because he knows perfectly well that Barca loves him, as some of his Spain teammates say. Going to La LIga is a real option, but it depends on how the Ousmane Dembele issue ends up.

Now: should we automatically believe this report? Absolutely not. Should it concern us? Possibly! For starters, if Barca are able to offload Ousmane Dembele this month, it opens up a bunch of possibilities for them at the end of the window. However, this could also be a situation entirely engineered by Adama’s manager, Jorge Mendes. And if we know anything about Mendes, it’s that he has extensive contacts in Spain, and at Barcelona. It’s also true that two days ago this looked about as rock solid a transfer for Spurs as it could look, but the news updates pretty much dried up over the last 24 hours.

There are also reports that Spurs are holding off on pulling the trigger on Adama because they’re waiting on a couple of outgoing player deals to go through first. All this information kind of conflicts! So sure, maybe Barcelona is interested in gazumping Traore like they (apparently) are doing with Franck Kessie, or maybe this is Mendes trying to make a last-ditch effort to extort more money out of Spurs. Or maybe it’s nothing. Unclear!

And if he does go to Barca, what are Spurs going to do with this pallet of baby oil?