Interesting note you may have seen in the news today as teams start offering pre-contract terms to poach out-of-country players whose contracts are up in the summer (such as Marouane Chamakh): Liverpool have apparently agreed terms with Milan Jovanovic of Serbia and Standard Liege. He looked good in the probably two Champions’ League games I’ve seen him in, which isn’t saying a whole lot. A striker! For Liverpool! Who is 28 and has played in the Champions’ League!! Actually, that sounds exactly like Andriy Voronin.
The other pre-contract signing of note is Arsenal’s signing of a defender (Montenegrin Stefan Savic). Why they didn’t just bite the bullet and pay a fee for the guy during the window I’ll never know, since he’s evidently leaving for nothing in the summer. They could have pulled a Liverpool/Maxi Rodriguez and offered next to nothing to get him now. But here’s the thing: he’s not going to help with their defensive cover problems because he’s yet another man-child. Unsurprisingly, he’s 19 and I had to look up his club because I’d never heard of it, which is frankly pretty rare. Here’s why: they were just promoted, for the first time in their history, to the Serbian Superliga after winning the second division. They’re currently 12th of 16 teams, which sounds great except that until this year the league only had 12 teams and they promoted 5 and only relegated 1 last year to expand it to 16, so the club is effectively exactly where it was last year but on pace to stay up.
Finally, apparently there is no deal in place taking Sergio Canales to Real Madrid as previously reported, but he’s going to resign with Racing so they can extort a big fee for him this summer (his contract was going to expire).
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