Man City renew interest in “genius” star who’s far better than Grealish2024 was the year Manchester City achieved an unprecedented fourth successive Premier League title, but what will 2025 bring?
Despite beating Leicester City 2-0 on Sunday, Savinho and Erling Haaland on target at the King Power, Pep Guardiola’s team are still down in sixth, having yielded a miserly five points from a possible 27 beforehand, with Guardiola admitting his side are “at risk” of missing out on Champions League qualification., having only signed the aforementioned Savinho for a reported £33m in the summer, one would imagine the Sky Blues are able to spend in January, so will Man City be busy this month?
Man City looking at Barcelona star
According to a report from Spain, Manchester City are amongst a group of major European clubs who’ve all expressed an interest in Dani Olmo; fellow-Premier League outfits Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea and Tottenham, as well as the current top two in the Bundesliga, Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen, are also named as “interested parties”.
So, why is there so much speculation surrounding Olmo’s future, considering he’s only just rejoined Barcelona from RB Leipzig for a fee of €60m (£51m) as recently as August?Well, as of midnight on New Year’s Day, Olmo is technically a free agent, having been deregistered by La Liga for the second half of the season.
La Liga’s strict financial rules, known as Squad Cost Limit, sees the league control how much each club can spend on transfers and, crucially in this case, wages prior to the start of the season, based on projected earnings.
To cut a long, and potentially complicated, story short, for the first half of the campaign, Barça deregistered Andreas Christensen after he suffered an Achilles injury against Valencia on the opening day of the season.This freed-up space for Olmo’s wages in the Blaugrana’s budget, but now Christensen is fit again, he is automatically registered with Olmo thereby currently unable to feature, with the Catalan giants almost certainly needing to sell someone else before this issue can be resolved.The only member of that sextet still yet to get off the mark is Grealish; it’s actually 383 days, and counting, since his last club goal.
As one prominent social media account mischievously put it on Twitter, Gabriel Jesus has now scored more goals in 2025 than Grealish managed throughout the entirety of 2024.
This lack of end-product means the Citizens will surely be looking to upgrade, so how do Grealish and Olmo compare?
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