• Fee could increase to £26m with performance
add-ons
• City turn attention to trimming bloated squad
Robinho
is close to ending his
unhappy two-year spell at Manchester City
by joining
Besiktas
after the Turkish club made a
formal offer of £16m, plus a further £10m in potential
add-ons.
The deal will offer City the chance to recoup at least half the
£32.5m they paid Real Madrid to make the Brazilian the most
expensive player in English football on the day the Abu Dhabi
United Group took control.
The rest of the proposal, submitted this afternoon after several
weeks of on-off negotiations between the two clubs, will be based
on performance-related payments, with Besiktas taking measures to
protect themselves against the 26-year-old fading as badly in
Istanbul as he has done in Manchester.
Several other clubs, notably the German side Schalke 04, have
also expressed an interest, but the talks with Besiktas are at an
advanced stage and it is thought Robinho's advisers have already
agreed in principle to a four-year contract.
Besiktas finished fourth in the Turkish league last season,
missing out on a place in the Champions League, but have shown
their ambition this summer by signing Guti from Real Madrid, where
the Spanish midfielder used to be a team-mate of Robinho,
and the Portuguese winger Ricardo Quaresma from Internazionale.
After ending his six-month loan arrangement with his former club
Santos back in Brazil, Robinho is also tempted by the chance to
work with Bernd Schuster, his former coach at Real. Schuster did
not want Robinho to leave the Bernabéu but the decision was taken
out of his hands by the then president, Ramón Calderón.
Garry Cook, the City chief executive, and the club's football
administrator, Brian Marwood, have been concentrating on bringing
in players over the last few weeks, but now that process is
concluded, with six players signed for a total cost of £126m,
they will turn their attention to trimming an
over-sized squad, and Robinho is regarded as
the priority.
Roberto Mancini, the City manager, has been planning without
him, and more talks will be held with the Besiktas chairman,
Yildirim Demiroren, today.
Robinho was strategically left out of City's squad for the
Europa League qualifier against Timisoara last night so his
transfer valuation would not depreciate. Schuster said: "I am
confident that our chairman will do everything in his power to make
this possible."
