Romano: Galatasaray in negotiations with Tottenham for Tanguy Ndombele, Davinson Sanchez

The England summer transfer window is closed, but that’s not the case for the windows in other countries. Specifically, the Saudi Arabian league’s window is open until September 7 (plenty of time for that £200m bid for Mo Salah), and Turkey’s transfer window continues until September 15, meaning they can still make approaches for Premier League players, and teams can still sell to teams in those leagues.

That said, the trouble with selling players to Turkey is that you have to pay at least token attention to the Turkish football media, which can literally make stuff up and is notoriously unreliable, even by Italian rumor mill standards. So it’s interesting then to get a tweet from Fabrizio Romano that states Galatasaray are currently in negotiations with Tottenham Hotspur for the possible transfer of two players — Tanguy Ndombele, and Davinson Sanchez.

Weird! Well, one of them is. Tanguy has been linked with Turkish clubs the entire window and up until now has turned down all approaches. But it’s pretty clear by now that nobody else is interested in him, and that might make a move to Galatasaray, which is currently playing in the Champions League, more palatable.

But Davinson? That’s the weird one, especially on Spurs’ side. He’s ostensibly Tottenham’s third CB, the first off the bench if anything goes wrong with Cuti Romero or Micky van de Ven. If Sanchez departs for Turkey, that leaves Spurs’ back line perilously thin — behind Cuti and Micky are... Ben Davies and Ashley Phillips (assuming Eric Dier doesn’t get registered as seems to be the case for now). Davies is also the primary backup to Destiny Udogie at LB, and Phillips is 18 and currently playing for Spurs’ U21 squad. Yikes!

Now, if you are viewing this season as the start of a project and you are banking on some of these younger guys getting good in a hurry, you might be able to talk yourself into offloading Davi for whatever price you can get for him now, leaning into the rebuilding angle, and getting minutes to Ash before dipping back into the CB market in January. But that’s a pretty big gamble and makes the club’s late failures to sign another reserve CB at the tail end of the window all that more striking, and scary.

For now I’m ignoring Turkish media sources, one of which says that Ndombele will be in Istanbul today for a medical, and waiting to see when it emerges from one of the usual Spurs beat writers. I also don’t know where Fab gets his sources, but he’s generally pretty good with regards to rumors. And it’s also worth noting that with both Davi and Tanguy, we don’t yet know if they’re permanent moves or loans, whether they have any purchase options or obligations built in, or what (if any) transfer fees we’re looking at. But if one, or both, of these rumors prove to have legs? Well. That’ll make things interesting, won’t it?

UPDATE: As is typical, the moment I published this article Fabrizio posted two tweets with additional information rendering some of the above instantly irrelevant.

First, we have a HERE WE GO on Tanguy Ndombele, which appears to be a loan with a purchase option. Meaning there’s a decent chance he could come back to Spurs. Again.

The Davinson Sanchez rumor is still a little murky, but it appears it’d be a permanent deal.