Villarreal linked to Atletico Madrid bust

I uh, don’t really get this one. Apparently we are now linked with Atletico Madrid’s Vitolo, who, to use a phrase from my part of America, has done jack diddly squat in the last four seasons worth anything.

I certainly understand why Vitolo would want to work with Emery again, after all, the Spaniard had several solid years with Emery at Sevilla. However, there are a few problems at play here. First are the wages. Vitolo makes over 9m euros a year, 178k a week. We simply aren’t gonna pay him that so unless he takes a massive pay cut we are talking about a loan where Atletico supplements the wages.

Second, Simeone has to accept the transfer of the player, and with Atleti still alive in both the league and the Champions League it is unclear whether he is willing to sacrifice depth, even though Vitolo hasn’t been the most productive player during his time in the nation’s capital.

Over the course of his career, Vitolo has played both sides of the field in attacking roles to almost equal proportions, but there isn’t a day in his life that he’s been worth the 35m Atleti spent on him and it easily goes down as one of their dumber buys in recent memory. Last season, Vitolo played in 28 matches for the mattress makers, coming off the bench 17 times. He had 3 goals and 2 assists in about 1200 minutes. That’s not lousy, but it’s not worth anything close to what he makes.

I think this deal is ultimately going to be too complicated to really get done in time before the window closes, but we’ll see.