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Breaking down all the major deals, rumors from transfer deadline day

Another transfer deadline day is in the books. Below, we provide quick-hit analysis of the biggest deals – and rumors – from the January window’s frantic final day.

Auba still expected to join Barcelona

This on-again, off-again, on-again deal provided the drama we’ve come to expect from deadline day.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang landed in Catalonia on Monday morning hoping to complete a loan move to Barcelona, but the switch seemingly collapsed due to issues with his gargantuan salary; the Gabonese forward earns £350,000 per week in north London, a figure that cash-strapped Barca shouldn’t be able to handle given their crushing debt.

And yet, with some (more) magic accounting, the Blaugrana are about to seal another marquee move in the January window.

“It seems we will do it,” club president Joan Laporta said of the signing, according to Agence France-Presse correspondent Tom Allnutt. An agreement is reportedly in place for the 32-year-old to move on a free transfer, thus abruptly ending his tumultuous Arsenal tenure.

An official announcement is expected Tuesday morning.

Barca, who chased Alvaro Morata earlier in the window, have scored only 32 goals in 21 La Liga matches this season. Adding scoring punch was paramount. Whether Aubameyang can deliver that after being forcibly sidelined since early December remains to be seen.

DONE DEAL: Eriksen returns to Premier League ?

  • Details: Short-term contract until end of the season (Read more)

The feel-good story of transfer deadline day.

Almost eight months after going into cardiac arrest during Euro 2020 – one of the most harrowing scenes in recent memory – Christian Eriksen is set to return to the pitch after signing a short-term contract with Premier League side Brentford until the end of the season.

The Dane mutually agreed to terminate his Inter Milan contract in December after Italian health authorities ruled that he was unable to play in the country due to the implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) that was fitted in his chest. With no such rule in England, though, he was free to return to the league in which he previously spent seven seasons with Tottenham Hotspur.

The 29-year-old had been training with former club Ajax to regain fitness.

“He is fit but we will need to get him match-fit and I am looking forward to seeing him work with the players and staff to get back towards his highest level,” said Brentford boss Thomas Frank, who worked with Eriksen earlier in his coaching career with Denmark’s U-17 team.

“At his best, Christian has the ability to dictate games of football. He can find the right passes and is a goal threat. … I expect him to have an impact in the dressing room and at the training ground.”

DONE DEAL: Manchester City sign Alvarez ?

  • Details: Striker joins for reported €17M initial fee (Read more)

Sound the alarm: Manchester City signed a striker.

Pep Guardiola’s team beat a host of suitors to the coveted signature of 22-year-old River Plate phenom Julian Alvarez. The Argentine, who already has five caps for his country, will remain on loan at River Plate for at least the rest of the campaign.

The arrival of Alvarez, one of the most exciting young forwards in South America, doesn’t necessarily take the Citizens out of the running for the likes of Erling Haaland and Harry Kane, either. Don’t be surprised if Guardiola is suddenly flush with strikers next season.

Money, obviously, is no issue at the Etihad Stadium.

DONE DEALS: Busy day for Tottenham ?

After missing out on Adama Traore and Luis Diaz earlier in the window, Spurs finally sealed a pair of deals, with director Fabio Paratici tapping into his Juventus connections to sign Rodrigo Bentancur and Dejan Kulusevski from the Italian side.

Bentancur’s arrival coincided with the departure of Tanguy Ndombele, whose difficult spell in north London mercifully ended with a loan move back to Lyon. Giovani Lo Celso was also shipped out on loan to Villarreal.

Bentancur, a 24-year-old Uruguayan international, will add an energetic presence to the Tottenham midfield. If given license by Antonio Conte, he could add a spark that’s been missing in the center of the pitch this season. Bentancur played primarily in front of the defense at Juventus, and he often anchors the Uruguayan midfield at the international level. However, he’s at his best when he’s covering ground and hunting the ball down, and not necessarily when he’s tasked with making the first pass to launch an attack.

Valerio Pennicino / Getty Images Sport / Getty

Meanwhile, Kulusevski showed as a teenager at Parma that he has all the tools necessary to become a thrilling attacking star. At his best, the Swede is quick and powerful, and combines that athleticism with excellent ball skills.

He stagnated after joining Juventus and has looked particularly off the pace this season, but his talent is undeniable. Conte, then, might be the perfect manager to harness it. His loan comes with a €35-million option to buy that becomes an obligation if certain conditions are met, giving Tottenham time to examine whether they believe Kulusevski can rediscover his best form.

DONE DEAL: Juventus win race for Zakaria ?

  • Details: Midfielder joins for €8.6M from Monchengladbach (Read more)

Speaking of Juventus …

The Bianconeri arguably own the clubhouse lead as “winners” of the January transfer window after snapping up Denis Zakaria, adding the in-demand Swiss midfielder just days after nabbing Dusan Vlahovic.

Zakaria, 25, was poised to become a free agent this summer.

Filippo Alfero – Juventus FC / Juventus FC / Getty

The Italian giants had desperately tried to address their subpar midfield for several years, largely to no avail. But Zakaria brings much-needed athletic ability and ball-winning prowess in front of the backline and, together with Manuel Locatelli, could be the foundation of a functional positional group.

That foundation doesn’t include Aaron Ramsey, however, as the Welshman was shipped out on loan to Rangers just before the deadline.

DONE DEALS: Everton’s midfield rebuild ?

It’s no great surprise that Frank Lampard, the highest-scoring midfielder in Premier League history, has quickly set to work on the center of Everton’s lineup following his appointment as manager.

Van de Beek is still an unknown quantity to many supporters in England due to his year-and-a-half residency on Manchester United’s bench. He’s only started four Premier League matches – none this season – so he has yet to fully showcase his intelligent, all-round game that pushed him to the fore at Ajax. The 24-year-old agreed to a short-term loan with the club, which is an arrangement that looks good for all parties.

Alli, 25, presents the biggest gamble despite his arrival on Merseyside reportedly being on a free transfer until appearances and add-ons begin incremental payments to Tottenham. His most productive period as an attacking threat from midfield was during the 2016-17 Premier League campaign when he logged 18 goals and seven assists, but the spark from his game has long been extinguished.

Dele Alli Visionhaus / Getty Images Sport / Getty

Amazon’s “All Or Nothing” docuseries, which tracked Tottenham’s 2019-20 season, famously included then-manager Jose Mourinho branding Alli “a f—— lazy guy in training.” Alli usually responded to Mourinho’s criticism with the smirk of a naughty schoolboy.

Nouveau-riche Newcastle United tried to gate-crash the deal on deadline day, according to The Athletic’s David Ornstein, but the Toffees eventually announced Alli’s transfer around 80 minutes after the deadline.

Everton – languishing in 16th place and with just four points between them and the relegation zone – need Alli to revive his old, exciting, and ultimately effective form. You suspect this switch could correct or kibosh the career of a player who was named PFA Young Player of the Year in both 2016 and 2017.

Quick hits: The ones that got away

Fran Santiago / Getty Images Sport / Getty

Ousmane Dembele: Barcelona face the prospect of losing Dembele on a free transfer at the end of the season after no clubs brokered a deal for the Frenchman in January. Dembele cost Barca an initial €105 million to sign from Borussia Dortmund in 2017.

Fabio Carvalho: Liverpool had an agreement in place for around £8 million to sign Carvalho from Fulham and then let the teenage forward remain at Craven Cottage for the rest of the season. But the Reds ultimately left it too late, and the requisite paperwork was not submitted in time to complete the deal. Carvalho is out of contract at the end of the season.

Dean Henderson: The goalkeeper, who’s faded into the background since David De Gea rediscovered his form at Manchester United, was on several clubs’ radar. Watford were among those who inquired about his availability, but United decided to retain Henderson’s services.

Jesse Lingard: United were also unmoved on the Lingard saga despite the versatile Englishman’s wish to move on loan for regular first-team football. Newcastle and West Ham United were interested.

NFL

Georgia artist goes big for Pro Bowl cleats of rookie Kyle Pitts

The conversation started casually, as it usually does whenever Curtis Booth inquires about whether a player wants his cleats to look like more than what comes out of the box from Nike, Adidas or UnderArmour.

Kenny Osuwah, assistant equipment manager for the Atlanta Falcons, reaches out. Or sometimes Booth hears from the player himself. Then, as the relationship is formed, Booth will reach out on his own. Which is how the idea came up to have what Falcons rookie tight end Kyle Pitts has on his feet at the Pro Bowl on Sunday (3 p.m. ET, ESPN) look like anything but a normal pair of shoes.

The Pro Bowl will be held on Sunday, Feb. 6 at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas at 3 p.m. ET., on ESPN.
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The custom Pro Bowl cleats of Falcons tight end Kyle Pitts are painted in University of Florida colors and list some of the accomplishments from his record-breaking rookie season. Courtesy of Curtis Booth

But those steps are what Booth focused on as he created Pitts’ shoes. He wanted Pitts’ feet — which were so integral to his first-season success — to display the message of how good his rookie year was, sort of a commemoration of what he accomplished splashed across his Jordan 5s.

“He’s the second [rookie] tight end ever to reach the 1,000-yard milestone, so I know I’m going to put that on there,” Booth said. “And maybe a couple stats and some Falcons logos, also. Still brainstorming, maybe have one cleat look completely different than the other cleat.

“But rookie things, definitely.”

Two weeks ago, Booth was in the brainstorming process, the first part of the creative painted journey from concept to creation — something the player didn’t see until he received the shoes just before he left for Las Vegas.

This isn’t as simple as putting some paint on a shoe and going with it. This is an hours-long process for each pair of shoes Booth works on.

It’s a process Booth has streamlined over the past three years, one self-taught from what he calls YouTube University. All of this happened so randomly — how the psychology major at North Carolina Central who wanted to become a forensic psychologist ended up doing this instead. He never imagined this in college, when his boredom and scrolling on Instagram took him to WalMart and he painted a pair of Jordan 1s pink.

He wore them to class. Because he knew nothing about the custom shoe business at the time, the color ran. It looked like he was wearing a pink-spotted cow. But classmates were still intrigued. This was years before it became his full-time job, before he locked in with the Falcons and became their cleat creator.

With Pitts’ shoes, because he had time, it began with brainstorming sessions. Knowing he was working with a six-panel Jordan 5 — the more panels available, the more creative he can be — Booth then takes an all-white silhouette and puts it in a photoshop mockup on his computer.

It’s there he messes around with different fonts and sizes to get an idea of what could go where and the type of space he might need for each idea to pop to life.

“I usually go on Instagram a lot and post my mockups and have people vote on which one they like best, and the highest vote, I’ll go with that,” Booth said. “A lot of times I’ll do that to make sure we’re on the same page. I’ll know what I want to do with it, so I’ll go post a different mockup to see if people are seeing the same thing that I see.

“That helps me out a lot because it’s like that second opinion, like definitely do that. Because otherwise, I’m thinking in the back of my head, ‘Ahh, should I do this or that?'”

Booth learned from experience to edit who can see the mockups in his stories — often blocking his clients so as not to spoil the surprise. Sometimes screenshots have leaked, a hazard of social media and a lesson Booth learned.

Design done, the real work starts. Each shoe has to be specifically prepped. Booth starts by taping the soles of cleats — they are unable to be painted — and then takes acetone, places it on a pad and scrubs down each shoe to take off the clear, unseen sealer on the top of each cleat. This will keep the paint from running and sliding off the shoe or cracking once it’s put on.

“The reason for that is to open up, I say to open up the pores a little bit,” Booth said. “To give the paint something to stick on to.”

Once the initial gloss is gone, Booth can start painting. He’ll add an adhesion promoter to the shoe to add a layer and give the paint another opportunity to stick to the shoe. If he’s doing a detailed design, like a logo or a cartoon character or stenciled writing — like for Pitts’ shoe — he’ll print out stencils and lay those down while the shoe is still fully white.

Then he’ll add a base coat of paint — usually white or gray depending on the colors he’s working with both on the shoe and the design — and let it dry. Then he’ll start painting in the detailed design and stencils. Finished there, he’ll go back to do touchups just in case any of the paint bled into another area of the shoe.

“I do my outlining last because that makes the design pop,” Booth said. “Pretty much that important step in the prep. That’s the important step because football players, they are pretty rough on sneakers. They are running and jumping and sliding and tackling and everything and the worst that happens is the paint comes off.

“And as an artist, you don’t want that to happen, because that kind of tells you the quality of work isn’t there.”

Booth is meticulous with each pair. When he’s done painting and likes the work of the shoe, he’ll seal it again — much like what was initially on the shoe that he scrubbed off. He first uses a scratch-resistant sealer, again protecting his work from the realities of football. Then, he’ll use either a glossy or matte finisher depending on the look he’s going for.

The average time it takes on a shoe, from brainstorm to completion, is around eight to 10 hours. For some of Patterson’s work, it took 15. For Pitts’ shoe, he allotted 20 hours.

“I really want to perfect that design on there,” Booth said. “And I want him to really stand out at the Pro Bowl.”

This isn’t the first time Pitts has tried to show some creativity during his rookie season. His request for a change to old Florida Gators cleats he had early in the season kickstarted the relationship with Booth.

And then there’s something else — something he had every game but didn’t always get noticed: The design on his hands.

When Pitts signed with Jordan Brand — the cleats he wears — one of the things they asked him about was if he wanted to help design anything else. Pitts decided he had interest in helping to create a unique pair of gloves just for him.

And what he ended up going with each game this year had one meaning — even if it ended up looking like another.

“With the eight in the middle, that was just one of the designs,” Pitts said. “I didn’t think of it as a bullseye until I had seen it and seen the colors and it was pretty cool. I didn’t think of that to signify anything.”

But for much of the season, it kind of did. Pitts became

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Soccer

Aubameyang finally joins Barcelona after leaving Arsenal by mutual consent

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang completed his much-anticipated free transfer to Barcelona on Wednesday, bringing an end to a whirlwind 48 hours in which negotiations nearly broke down over the forward’s salary costs.

Barcelona said they agreed to a three-and-a-half-year contract with the option to opt out of the deal in June 2023. His buyout clause is set at €100 million.

Arsenal terminated the remaining 18 months of Aubameyang’s contract by mutual consent on Tuesday, with the player waiving future earnings of around £350,000 per week.

His departure could save the Gunners up to £27 million over that span, The Athletic’s James McNicholas and Amy Lawrence report.

Meanwhile, Barcelona could end paying Aubameyang just £1.6 million this season, according to BBC Sport’s Guillem Balague. The 32-year-old was reportedly happy to take any payment to make the deal happen.

Aubameyang traveled to Barcelona in anticipation of the move Monday, but talks over a potential loan deal reportedly collapsed later in the day.

Arsenal had apparently agreed to waive any fee as long as Barcelona covered the majority of Aubameyang’s salary. But the difference was too great for the Blaugrana, especially with Ousmane Dembele still on the books. Dembele, whose contract expires in June, turned down two offers to leave Barca in January, club president Joan Laporta said Tuesday.

Arsenal and Barcelona reportedly resurrected negotiations hours before the transfer deadline, with the Gunners desperate to offload a player who was stripped of the captaincy for disciplinary reasons earlier in the season.

Laporta admitted the documents required to finalize the transfer arrived just one minute before the deadline.

Aubameyang’s last appearance for Arsenal came as a late substitute in their 2-1 loss to Everton on Dec. 6. After a late return from a club-sanctioned trip to France to visit his ill mother, manager Mikel Arteta left Aubameyang out of Arsenal’s following six games.

The forward later joined Gabon’s national team at the Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon, where he tested positive for COVID-19. Gabon sent him home after discovering a heart condition related to the virus.

Aubameyang, who joined Arsenal from Borussia Dortmund in 2018 for a then-club-record £56 million, leaves a complicated legacy in north London. He won the Premier League Golden Boot alongside Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah in 2018-19 and the FA Cup in 2020, and he scored 92 goals in 162 appearances across all competitions.

DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS / AFP / Getty

In September 2020, Aubameyang signed a new three-year contract that eased the blow of Mesut Ozil’s eventual exit later that season. He vowed to become a “legend” of the club like Thierry Henry and “leave a legacy” but struggled to earn his keep. With just four goals in 14 Premier League appearances this term, Aubameyang lost the patience of the fans and manager, bolting at the earliest opportunity for Barcelona.

“Thank you for making London home for myself and my family for the past four years,” Aubameyang wrote on Instagram. “We went through ups and downs together, and your support meant everything to me. Having the chance to win trophies and the honor of being the captain of this club is something I will forever keep in my heart.

“I’ve always been 100% focused and committed on doing everything I can for this club, which is why leaving without a real goodbye hurts, but that is football.”

He’ll now competes for minutes alongside the likes of Ansu Fati, fellow signing Ferran Torres, and Memphis Depay up front.

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