Spurs make £29m man top January transfer target as Aston Villa and Brentford eye Serie A star

Welcome to Saturday’s round-up of all the biggest and boldest Premier League transfer rumours that have been in the media over the past 24 hours – and we’ll start in North London, with a report which has Ange Postecoglou preparing to hit the January sales.

Tottenham Hotspur spent much of the summer transfer window trying to find a new midfielder without success (the up-and-coming Lucas Bergvall aside) but may have found a solution – according to TeamTalk, Spurs are preparing to make a January move for Valencia midfielder Javi Guerra.

The highly-rated 21-year-old is valued at £29m by his club, although Spurs will apparently try to negotiate a “more reasonable” price tag if they can. Guerra had been linked with Manchester United as well, but they’re out of the picture after signing Manuel Ugarte.

The 3AM Verdict: A hard-working defensive midfielder with good tackling skills, Guerra is still raw and has a lot of development still to do but he’s been impressive with a poor Valencia side and a big move seems inevitable. £29m doesn’t sound too ‘unreasonable’ in the current market, either. One note of caution – one of the article’s sources is Spanish outlet Fichajes, who are notoriously unreliable.

Three clubs chase Serie A star

A slightly strange story here from HITC, which seems to be cobbled together from a few different threads but which may be of interest to fans of a few clubs. The report discusses summer interest from both Aston Villa and Brentford in Fiorentina right-back Michael Kayode, and implies that they are among three Premier League sides who could make a move in the future.

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Apparently Villa had a £12m bid rebuffed, with La Viola holding out for closer to £25m for the 20-year-old, who only signed for his current side in 2023 but quickly established himself in the first team. It seems that Kayode has also “caught the eye” of Spurs, but there’s no word on how likely any of those sides are to lodge a bid in January. Instead, it takes multiple different comments from Italian pundits to put together a picture of a player perhaps more likely to remain at Fiorentina for the foreseeable future.

The 3AM Verdict: There’s a lot of hearsay in this piece and punditry which isn’t itself carefully sourced, and we’re not sure what to make of it. Certainly the price tag seems a little steep but Kayode is technically gifted, quick and can play wide or come into midfield as required, so he certainly seems like a player who will draw attention. Whether any of these teams will come in soon, and whether £25m is a fair reflection of his real value, we’re not certain.

Chelsea set to miss out on star target

Finally, we come bearing what may be sad news for fans of Chelsea, courtesy of Caught Offside. They claim that the Blues remain highly interested in a move for Bayer Leverkusen defender Jonathan Tah, who becomes a free agent next summer – but it seems there’s a “good chance they’ll miss out” on him regardless.

Apparently the main problem is that also Tah has many suitors, he has a contract agreed with Bayern Munich, who cancelled an attempt to buy him because they were unable to offload Kingsley Coman, a move which would have cleared sufficient space on the balance sheet. They also claim, somewhat surprisingly, that Chelsea have decided to instigate a rule by which new players can only be paid £70,000 per week, which is news to us and seems oddly stingy for such a free-spending side. Bayern would pay three times as much.

The 3AM Verdict: The primary source for these claims is a journalist from German newspaper Bild, and we’re not sure how much stock to out in his claim about the Blues’ suddenly tight-fisted approach to contracts given that it’s the first we’ve heard about it – although even most of their big signings aren’t on massive weekly wages, at least by Premier League standards. We do, however, believe that Tah is set on joining Bayern if given the chance, as it’s not the first time we’ve heard that it’s his preference to stay in Germany.