Marseille and Paris ignited the end of the transfer window! The promising Portuguese striker Vitinha signed Tuesday at OM, while waiting for the Moroccan winger Hakim Ziyech at PSG, at the end of a winter market which was slow to come alive, apart from lavish spending by Chelsea.
During a final day that promised to be decisive for several Ligue 1 clubs, the Marseille-Paris duo hit hard: OM overtook the English clubs and attracted the promising Vitinha (Braga), who could become the biggest transfer of its history, while PSG have set their sights on one of the headliners of the recent World Cup in Qatar.
These two offensive reinforcements, pending the formalization of Ziyech’s arrival, have come to give some luster to a transfer market that is generally quite sluggish in Ligue 1, except perhaps in Lyon or Lorient.
The president of OM Pablo Longoria has pulled out all the stops to attract Vitinha, a young international center forward from Braga (22), who has signed up for four and a half years for a total amount of up to 32 million euros. (25 million + 7 million bonus), to which could be added 10% of a future transfer, according to the Portuguese club.
Either an operation that would exceed the biggest recruitment ever made by OM, namely the return of Dimitri Payet in 2017 (30 M EUR).
“From Braga to Marseille. New number 9 in town,” Marseille tweeted.
OM, which has long been looking for a top “great striker”, has high hopes for Vitinha, who has scored 13 goals and five assists in 27 matches this season.
This arrival concludes in any case a spectacular winter recruitment after the Ukrainian Ruslan Malinovskyi and the Moroccan revelation of the World Cup-2022 Azzedine Ounahi.
– Ziyech in Paris, not Skriniar –
PSG also chose one of the heroes of Morocco, semi-finalist of the World Cup with the arrival on loan of Hakim Ziyech (29 years old), given for granted by the press subject to formalization. A file activated late when Paris had not previously attracted any recruits in this transfer window.
The Chelsea winger, with a strong character, was lacking playing time with the Blues. But he will have to deal in Paris with the indestructible attacking trio made up of Kylian Mbappé, Lionel Messi and Neymar.
Can his arrival restore momentum to PSG, stuck in a worrying spiral of results before finding Bayern Munich in the knockout stages of the Champions League (February 14, March 8)?
In defense, on the other hand, the Slovak Milan Skriniar (27) will have to wait to sign for PSG: the transfer window closed at 8:00 p.m. in Italy without Inter Milan finding a replacement for him … The Lombard club nevertheless half-acknowledged that Skriniar would join Paris in June.
In terms of departures, the L1 leader has sold the Spaniard Pablo Sarabia to Wolverhampton, pending the fate of replacement goalkeeper Keylor Navas, very high salary, likely to go on loan to Nottingham Forest …
Elsewhere in L1, big deals have been few.
Lorient managed two nice gains by selling their winger Dango Ouattara to Bournemouth for more than 20 million euros, then their center forward Terem Moffi to Nice, where the Nigerian striker signed on Tuesday for a loan with a purchase obligation set at 25 million euros plus five million bonuses.
– The Chelsea frenzy –
In Lyon, sad 9th in Ligue 1, OL have slimmed down and remodeled their workforce. Dejan Lovren, a former home, reinforced the defense, and the young Swede Amin Sarr came to garnish the attack, as well as the Brazilian winger Jeffinho.
In terms of sales, the most lucrative transaction of the winter in L1 is to the credit of Monaco, which recovered nearly 40 million euros from Chelsea for its defender Benoît Badiashile.
It is the symbol of the spending frenzy of the London club, a major animator of this January transfer window with more than 200 M EUR invested, in particular to steal Ukrainian striker Mykhailo Mudryk from the nose and beard of Arsenal.
And the last day was again animated by the Blues, very close to investing some 120 M EUR for the Argentinian midfielder Enzo Fernandez (Benfica), a transaction being finalized in the last minutes of the English transfer window.
The rest of the big European clubs were parsimonious in January, like Manchester City, Real Madrid or Manchester United, which saw its superstar Cristiano Ronaldo leave for a golden exile in the Saudi club Al -Nassr.
