Jonathan dos Santos negotiating with LA Galaxy

Jonathan dos Santos appears to be leaving Villarreal’s employ. Together with the timeline of the Pablo Fornals negotiations and eventual signing there’s been a second timeline involving Jona.

At the start of Villarreal’s friendly on Saturday Javi Mata talked about the Fornals negotiations but referred to interest in Jona. At the same time as the Fornals signing happened, we learned Jona had been allowed more time away from the club.

He has been in Los Angeles, where I believe his girlfriend is now working and where he and brother Gio ran a summer soccer camp for kids. We knew last January LA Galaxy were interested in Jona, but Sr. Roig told them to come back in the summer if they were still interested.

At the start of the summer it seemed Jona was less interested in moving, but now he seems very interested. Negotiations are continuing, but the lure of playing with his brother in MLS in a huge media market seems to be the big draw. ESPN has reported a deal should be done by Thursday.

MLS clubs can’t afford to pay the big transfer fees that European teams pay, so the deal will probably be structured such that we take less € in transfer fee that we’d like, but maybe try to recoup some additional money in add-ons and selling-on fees. Bottom line, though, is that if Jona wants to go to LA, Villarreal is not going to stand in his way. We sold Gio to the Galaxy for about €6.35m, according to Transfermarkt ($7m US) and I would expect we’d end up getting somewhere around that for Jona.

More updates as we have them.