Werder Bremen Playing Hardball Over Mesut Özil

There’s still about two weeks of transfer window left, which means there’s still plenty of transfer rumours and wrangles left to blog about. Arguably the biggest right now is Mesut Özil, with Real Madrid eager to sign Werder Bremen’s attacking midfielder.

Let’s ignore the fact that Real Madrid already have Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaká, Ángel di María, Rafael van der Vaart, Sergio Canales, Karim Benzema, Gonzalo Higuain and others to do their attacking, and accept that for some reason Real are determined to sign someone else’s best player and make him one of their squad players. Because they can. The interesting part here is that though Özil reportedly wants to go, Werder Bremen are in no mood to sell, at least not for the money Madrid are currently offering. And so the battle of wills commences:

Real had an initial bid of €9 million (£7.4m) rejected, but have now upped their bid to €14m although Bremen are still thought to want €18m.

This is now such an established and well-worn story that Syd Field could write a book about it: Big club bids for best player of medium club, medium clubs says “no, we want more”, big clubs slowly increases offer without meeting amount medium club requested, player gets more and more unsettled, medium club eventually sells for less than they demanded.

Real are now so insistent on getting Özil in a Madrid jersey, that pro-Madrid paper Marca ran a story today, semi-outraged that Bremen dared to include Özil in their team photo.

Bremen do have one last trick up their sleeve though. This Wednesday, Werder will play Sampdoria in the first leg of the Champions League Playoff Round. If Özil plays in that game then he’s cup-tied in the Champions League, which would presumably end Real Madrid’s interest.

If you were Werder coach Thomas Schaaf, then what would you do?

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Category: Bundesliga