The sneaky swap deal that could help both Spurs and Nottingham Forest get exactly what they want

It’s been a week or since the Guardian first reported that Tottenham Hotspur were interested in signing Callum Hudson-Odoi from Nottingham Forest following his sparkling form at the end of the season, and there has been precious little movement in the meantime. That isn’t especially surprising, given how early it is in the window, but it would also be no shock if negotiations were relatively challenging.

Partly, that’s because although Forest are in a tricky financial position thanks to the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules – breaches of which saw them docked points this year – they are also loathe to lose the high-class players whose goals helped to keep them up. If they lose players like Hudson-Odoi and Morgan Gibbs-White, they will need to find replacements, and that takes time.

The good news for Forest is they would net a healthy profit on any sale – Hudson-Odoi cost just £3m when he arrived last summer – but that doesn’t negate the need to replace him on a similarly tight budget. They struck gold once, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy to do it again.

But one possible answer lies in the very negotiations with Spurs they probably dread. Because as the north London side look to bolster their attacking line ahead of a fresh charge at the Champions League placings, they also have some dead weight to get rid of – and there are two players who could easily be used as makeweights in a deal for Hudson-Odoi.

Bryan Gil, as it stands, is all unfulfilled promise and few hard results. He arrived from Spain with a fair amount of fanfare but has yet to live up to his billing and is now some way down the Spurs pecking order. But he remains a tricky, pacey winger who can offer a similar sort of direct threat to Hudson-Odoi and can match him for dribbling and technique, if not yet for goals and end product.

There’s no denying that Gil would be a step down on recent form, but he’s hardly much more of a salvage job than the man he could replace – and they could package him into a deal with Spurs, likely with the blessing of all parties involved, and give themselves a shot at replacing the man they’re selling and turning a profit at the same time, while avoiding adding anything to the spending column on the balance sheets.

And Gil isn’t the only player who’s surplus to requirements at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium who could make sense in such a trade. Giovani Lo Celso started just four games under Ange Postecoglou last season and seems destined for an exit – but the raw numbers suggest a player who is still performing at an extremely high level.

On a purely per-game basis, Lo Celso was among the best creators and goalscorers in the Spurs side, and given the statistics he laid down during his brief time on the field, it’s surprising that he wasn’t given more chances – nevertheless, the Argentine is no more than a depth option at Spurs right now. That would likely not be the case at the City Ground.

While he is hardly a natural winger and would play a very different role than Hudson-Odoi, he has the creative chops to elevate the team in a similar way and could easily add a dimension to the Forest attack that is currently lacking. They simply don’t have an attacking midfielder with his level of vision or his passing range. Given his previous struggles at Spurs, he may not be a sure thing, but he seems like a risk worth taking – and Forest already gambled unsuccessfully on Giovanni Reyna in January, likely in the hopes of finding that extra spark in attack that Lo Celso might just provide.

This is all speculation and conjecture, of course, but it’s not often that two teams provide solutions to one another’s problems quite so neatly. Spurs get their man, Forest get a prospective replacement without upsetting the accounts department too much. No doubt Forest have plans drawn up already for the likely departures of some of their star players, but don’t be shocked if horse trading with the buying clubs is somewhere on the agenda.