Yesterday evening Marca reported Canales would go to Valencia rather than Villarreal, and that has come to pass. It appears the deal is essentially the same as what Villarreal had proposed, a two year loan with an option to buy at the end, but the difference is that Valencia were willing to pay Canales more in salary than Villarreal.
Before Los Che fans do too much celebrating, though, the reason Canales is being obtained is that (after continual denials that he was for sale) Juan Mata is about to be sold to Arsenal. So yet another star is leaving La Liga, or perhaps more importantly another star is leaving a team not called Barcelona or Real Madrid.
Atletico Madrid, having sold DeGea and Aguero, has oodles of cash but hasn't spent any yet; Villarreal, meanwhile, have €20m in cash in their pocket from the summer deals. Yet, EPM reports Roma has made an initial offer for Nilmar which was rejected (€14m plus variables), but has not rejected the idea of selling Nilmar out of hand, in part because the club believes they can replace him and in part because his salary is very high. Not for the first time this summer, I am having a hard time understanding Villarreal's position.
Of course, the reason Roma wants Nilmar is because they may sell Vucinic to Juventus, since Rossi is staying here.
Meanwhile, the chill economic winds that are blowing across Spain have forced the Bankia group to apply for help from the European Central Bank, and is offering Ronaldo and Kaka to the ECB as collateral. Seriously. Something else to put on your resume, I guess. "I helped bail out a bank!"
And if you thought La Liga was tilted toward the big two, Napoli can tell you Italy is the same way. Aurelio De Laurentiis stormed out of the meeting to set the fixture list after seeing his team screwed over. Watch the video!
Returning to Vila-real, today is the feast day of the town's patron saint, San Pascual, so the team has gone en masse to participate in ceremonies (as Giuseppe Rossi tweeted, "Going with the team to San Pascual..every year the priest does the same things but still a cool guy").
After that, Sr. Roig is giving a press conference. Should be interesting. If anything interesting comes out of it, we'll let you know!