Spurs boss defends club's January window despite Diaz and Traore failure

Stefan Bienkowski

• 3 Feb 2022 12:53 CST
• 3 min read

Tottenham Hotspur’s managing director of football Fabio Paratici has defended the club’s January transfer window activity, despite the failure to sign Luis Diaz or Adama Traore.

The London club were heavily linked with moves for both forwards, but Diaz eventually chose a move to Liverpool instead and Traore departed Wolves for Barcelona, despite spending a day touring the club’s facilities at Spurs.

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Tottenham did end up bringing in some last-minute recruits in the form of Rodrigo Bentancur and Dejan Kulusevski, who both joined from Juventus for a £17 million fee and on loan respectively.

Few would argue that the pair signified deals as big as Diaz or Traore, but Paratici has pushed back on claims that the club are struggling to sign top-class players.

’Sometimes you lose the race’

“It’s normal for us to be in the middle of this kind of rumours and it’s also normal when you start the race and to fight to sign big players,” said the Tottenham boss to the Independent.

“We are a big club, there are 10-12 big clubs in the world, so it’s normal when you start to race or to fight to sign a big player. Of course you have somebody that deserves to sign this player too.

“Sometimes you win, as what happened with (Cristian) Romero in the summer, and sometimes you can lose the race. I think the worst and strange thing is not being in the race.

“We have to be committed and, like I said before, to be in the race when there is somebody good enough for us.

“We want to sign players who can improve our team, we don’t sign just to sign. That is not useful for the club, not useful for the coach, not useful for everybody.

“There are some positions where we searched and find solutions and others where we don’t have this kind of opportunities.

“It’s OK, we go ahead, we go forward with our players and we are happy about it.”