Tottenham Hotspur have confirmed the signing of teenage defensive midfielder Pape Sarr from Metz. The player will stay on loan at Metz for the 21/22 season, and will join the Spurs squad in June 2022.
The player was pursued by a number of Premier League sides such as Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea, but Tottenham managed to get ahead of their competitors for the signature of the 18-year-old.
Spurs paid the French club £13 million up front, and the final amount could rise to £25.5 million including all bonuses.
“In Senegal, at the age of 15 and a half, he played his first match…I immediately said to myself that he was a top player, with a very high-level [of] reading and analysing the game,” Oliver Perrin, who first saw Sarr at his boyhood club, Generation Foot, in Senegal and has also spent time coaching at Metz.
“He is [like] Miralem Pjanic. He can play in a system with two No.10s; he can be in the middle and play box-to-box; he can be a 10 or a six – it depends on the coaches.”
Spurs have also sanctioned the sale of Moussa Sissoko to newly promoted club Watford for a reported fee worth £2.5 million. The 32-year-old joined Spurs in 2016, and has made over 200 appearances for them across all competitions. He has now signed a two-year contract with the Hornets after falling out of favour under Nuno Espirito Santo.
