According to reports in France, Newcastle United’s improved offer for Sven Botman has been rejected by Lille.
This comes from RMC Sport, who claim that the Ligue 1 side have turned down a bid of ‘around €35m’ (£29m) from Newcastle, with this being our second offer for the highly-rated Dutchman.
They also report that Lille are resisting all approaches, ‘for the moment’, for their star centre-back, suggesting we are no closer to bringing in the man believed to be our top centre-back target this month.
Here’s a snippet from Loïc Tanzi’s latest piece for the French paper this afternoon:
Identified by several European recruiting cells, the central defender is probably the most courted. But the LOSC is resisting, for the moment, all approaches. Newcastle are however very urgent and made several offers to Lille, the last of which is around 35 million euros.
This may explain why a number of outlets (The Mail and Sky Sports) have revealed this morning that we’re also in talks with Monaco over a move for Benoit Badiashile; another big, left-footed centre-back who The Athletic named as our ‘back-up’ option to Botman on Friday.
So, do we go again with a third bid for Botman or turn our full attention to Badiashile in an attempt to bring in a centre-back for Saturday’s game with Watford?
Milan have told the press this morning they have withdrawn from the process as he has agreed somewhere else…
BillyTheFish(Quote)