The 23-year-old midfielder has been offered to London rivals by Tottenham.
Tottenham have offered Pape Matar Sarr to Brentford as they explore ways of trimming a suddenly overcrowded midfield, according to club insider Paul O’Keefe. While the Bees did not show a great load of interest until a few weeks ago, the situation can come to the fore before deadline day.
Sarr’s situation sums up how quickly a squad can shift under a new manager and a busy transfer window. He has been at the club for four seasons, made 141 appearances and scored 11 goals, and last season alone he made 37 appearances across all competitions, form that helped him earn a place in Senegal’s World Cup squad.
But dig into those numbers, and the picture is less flattering: only 13 Premier League starts and a manager carousel throughout the campaign that never let him settle into one system.
Once De Zerbi arrived, Sarr found himself behind Conor Gallagher, Joao Palhinha and Rodrigo Bentancur in the pecking order across the final stretch of games, and the club’s subsequent business has only compounded the problem.
Sarr heading out?
Spurs paid a combined £185m or so for Sandro Tonali and Mateus Fernandes this summer specifically to solve their midfield control issues, and with Archie Gray and Bentancur also occupying that part of the pitch, Sarr’s route back into regular selection looks narrow at best. Tellingly, De Zerbi left both him and Bentancur out of the touring squad for Tottenham’s pre-season trip to Australia, with the club citing extra recovery time after the World Cup, which surely has to be a facade.
Sarr is also attracting interest from considerably bigger clubs than Brentford. Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and PSG have all made contact according to various reports from ESPN, with his valuation sitting around the £50m mark and Spurs publicly insisting he is not for sale even as they privately brace for offers. A loan to Marseille has also seen itself floated.
Sarr at his best is a genuinely exciting box-to-box midfielder with a top engine, and there is a reasonable fear that this becomes one of those sales the club comes to regret three years down the line.
But football clubs make decisions based on what a squad needs right now. De Zerbi’s midfield is simply not built with Sarr as a starter in his current thinking. What it takes is the right price.
