Aston Villa snubbed by Barcelona starlet as Man City home in on big-money midfielder

Aston Villa have been great value this transfer window, their wandering eye finding all sorts of ambitious targets as it scans Europe’s biggest leagues, plucking out players that the Midlanders should have no right to sign – Pau Torres, Moussa Diaby, Youri Tielemans, and even Nicolò Zainolo. But, sadly, they’ve finally hit the buffers on one of their bids. Barcelona’s Abde Ezzalzouli won’t be coming to Villa Park.

The 21-year-old Moroccan forward, who scored six goals while spending last season on loan at Osasuna, has apparently decided to spend one more season banging his head against the brick wall of regular first-team football, and won’t be going anywhere. This is all according to Sport Witness, who have kindly translated the terrifying ramblings of El Chiringuito to bring us the update.

The 3AM Verdict: Ezzalzouli doesn’t have enough games behind him for us to know whether he could crack the Premier League or not, but he’s already made it into the Moroccan national team and is rated reasonably highly in Spain. So this could be a bit of a bummer for Unai Emery, but no doubt they’ve got one more coup in them before the transfer window slams shut in a week or so.

City’s Eze living

With the proposed deal for West Ham United’s Lucas Paquetá spectacularly falling through over an investigation into alleged gambling offences, Manchester City are back in the market for a midfielder to replace the injured Kevin de Bruyne – and the latest player to be offered that deeply unenviable task is Crystal Palace’s Eberechi Eze.

Or, depending on who you believe, it could be Wolves’ Matheus Nunes, the Portuguese midfielder who could politely be described as “quite bad last season”. Rumours that the collected fans of Wolverhampton have already driven him all the way to Pep Guardiola’s hospital bedside appear to be unfounded, however. Anyway, the Manchester Evening News reckon that Guardiola is simply considering both players, and that Eze (the less eyebrow-raising option of the two) is rated at £70m by his current club.

The 3AM Verdict: Eze is a great little player, and while he’s completely different to someone like De Bruyne, he could probably do a very passable Riyad Mahrez/Ilkay Gündoğan hybrid impression. So that covers a few bases, and while £70m is a lot of cash… well, it isn’t to Abu Dhabi. As for Nunes, eyebrows at the 3 Added Minutes office have collectively raised several miles after hearing about that one, but Guardiola is nothing if not a very shrewd judge of a player. And can probably get more of a tune out of him than Bruno Lage did, anyway.

Busy Bees target Argentine wideman

Lastly for today’s round-up of transfer rumours, let’s head over to the Brentford Community Stadium, where there’s a bit of a buzz that Thomas Frank has come back in with a second bid for Fiorentina’s Nico González.

Football Italia reckon that the Bees bid under the asking price of €40m earlier in August (The Athletic reported that they went for €30m at the time) but are now coming back for another pass – although apparently La Viola really don’t want to lose the Argentinian, who has 21 goals in the past two seasons with the Serie A side, and could resist. Or at least hold out for a few more quid. He’s got three years left on his contract, so the Italian side are in a pretty strong position on this one.

The 3AM Verdict: González would act more as another wide forward option than he would as any kind of Ivan Toney replacement – he’s a bit of a Jack-of-all-trades forward, a decent passer, sharp finisher and with excellent off-the-ball movement. He also wins a freakish amount of headers for a sub-six foot wide forward. Anyway, €40m sounds a little steep for a player who’s never scored more than seven goals in a top league, but Frank is also a much better judge of talent than we are – so we’ll defer to the Dane on this one.