Aston Villa wants to wrap up the signing of Arsenal goalkeeper, Emiliano Martinez before their game against Sheffield United, Sun Sports reports.
The Villans have made the Argentinean their top target in the last few days after they lost Tom Heaton to injury and Pepe Reina to Lazio.
Martinez has emerged as one of the most sought-after goalkeepers in Europe recently after he took his chance at Arsenal.
He had been the second choice at the club before an injury to Bernd Leno in June forced Mikel Arteta to make him the goalie for the rest of the season.
He did brilliantly and helped the Gunners win both the FA Cup and the Community Shield.
Leno is now back from his injury and Arteta faces a dilemma on who to make his first choice.
Martinez has ramped up the pressure on the Spanish manager by insisting that he will have to be number one or he will leave the club.
Villa manager, Dean Smith is confident that his team will sign the Argentinean after they made another bid of around £20 million, according to the report.
It also adds that Martinez has rejected Arsenal’s latest contract offer as he wants assurances that he will be number one, and he wants the move because he knows he will be the first choice at Villa Park.
Plus Villa are offering more, apparently…
ION, Guendouzi is back training with the first team! Yay! 🙂👍
Good for Guendouzi, its time for everyone to move forward. As for this Villa saga, £20 million is too cheap most people think for Emi. And his demands to start are too much, even Arteta thinks no guaranteed starts for anyone.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see Leno start, Emi needs to learn his place and Arteta chooses the 11 not players. Interesting to see how Arteta handles this; Ozil benched, Guendouzi got banished, maybe Emi needs some time on the bench as well.
Durand so you are saying Emi hasn’t done enough to earn a starting spot. Let me tell you something bro, no sane coach will drop Emi just yet, at least until he starts making errors.
FACTS
But remember that Leno was flawless until his injury that kept him away, and arteta changed the formation from 4:2:3:1 to 3:4:3 to shield the back
Ok so im not taking anything away from Martinez after Leno had his injury, he was superb and yes he stepped up and showed us all what he’s made of. He was Superb!
He isnt going to be No.1 this season, Leno was runner up player of the season, is proven at many levels and i can only see that that wont fit well with Emi and he will move on, 20m for a player any one of us would have taken £5m for him before the restart and i think thats what the club will be looking at.
at the end of the day, we don’t have many real bankable assets that are in and around the fringes of the squad ( well even in the main first team ) that we can actually do without at this point in time.
For me the squad needs a pretty big overhaul.
One, we have far to many players, 34 or something around that, so we need to reduce that by 10 or close to it.
We know we have a very large wage bill with some absurd wages being paid for players that just dont fit in anywhere.
So to me its pretty logical the club are trying to move players on who 1 hold value and 2 we can do without.
As we all know we have to many CB’s at the club now ( 8 i believe ) but there are injuries to CC, SM, PM and now Luiz with a neck injury, couple that with the report of big Sokratis possibly nearing the exit door with a contract termination, it would leave us short for the short term if Holding were to also leave for Newcastle which would mean that we would only have Saliba and Gabriel fit for the season opener on Saturday, which would be to soon and maybe MA feels the same.
It is important to remember there is still close to a month left in this transfer window where we hope we can raise the funds needed to strengthen midfield, its something in the region of 100m.
Just think, next season we’ll have an extra 18m to use just from 1 player leaving XD
We, the club, are in the driving seat here, as Martinez has another two years on his contract I believe.
Tell villa to take a running jump, or include Grealish in the deal… let’s see what happens then!!!
£20 million? No way Jose!!!
Now that I like.👍👍
Have to agree