Spurs ready to offer £40m + incentives for Maddison

Here’s the current state of play on Tottenham Hotspur’s interest in James Maddison. There’s a new article out from John Percy in the Telegraph that states Spurs are ready to make their first offer for the Leicester star and America’s fourth president, and are hoping that an agreement can be reached between the two clubs over the next week. Leicester, who will be playing in the Championship next season, are demanding £60m but Spurs are hoping an initial bid of £40m plus various time and performance-based incentives might convince them to make a deal.

You won’t have to look very far to find people screaming about Daniel Levy underbidding for Maddison, but the truth (again) is that £60m is pretty expensive for a player who wants out in order to play Premier League football and whose other main option, Newcastle, just backed off. This is standard negotiation. I don’t expect that Leicester will jump at Tottenham’s offer, but this would set the stage for a compromise, say £45-50m, a good chunk of that up-front, and some easily obtainable appearance bonuses. Norwich City apparently also get a sell-on fee if Maddison goes, so there’s likely an opportunity for some creative accounting there as well.

Maddison doesn’t want to play in the Championship next season, so this feels like a transfer that COULD be drawn out until late into the summer. But maybe it doesn’t have to? And it’d be cool if it didn’t. Maybe Leicester need the money after relegation, or maybe they’re getting pressure from Maddison to make a deal. Who knows! But a £40m+ bid feels like a reasonable starting point, knowing it’s almost certainly going to end up somewhere between that and £60m-straight-cash-homie.

I’d kind of love it if Spurs got some of their incoming business done early so they can spend much of the summer selling players in bulk. That isn’t typically how Spurs have done business, but there’s a lot of things changing at Tottenham at the moment. It’d be pretty neat if this were one of them, and we could welcome Maddison to north London in the first part of July.