Real Madrid Eyeing Brazilian Center Back in January Transfer Market

In the intensive search for possible center backs to sign in this January market, Real Madrid is narrowing down several names and as AS learned, one of them is Brazilian Robert Renan, a 20-year-old defender owned by Zenit Saint Petersburg. A central defender who meets the three main premises that the white entity is looking for: that he is left-footed, young and with a great future ahead of him (Renan has been international for the absolute Canarinha for the first time) and that his price is contained. That is, it can arrive through a very affordable transfer or, preferably, through a loan with a purchase option in the summer. A formula to evaluate your performance before making a final decision.

Renan is within the spectrum of Brazilian talents that Juni Calafat has been following. Emerging from the Corinthians youth academy, he would also fit into another of the parameters that Madrid wants to have controlled. Get young people who come from selling clubs when their price is not yet prohibitive. As he did at the time with Valverde (Peñarol, €5M), Lunin (Zorya, €8.5M) and Camavinga (Rennes, €32M), for example. The formula of the transfer with purchase has been carried out, in recent times, with the Castilla full-back Vinicius Tobias, a 19-year-old Brazilian on loan from Shakhtar. Madrid negotiated a clause to keep him in July 2024 for a figure close to €15M.

This method could please Zenit, which just a year ago reached an agreement with Corinthians for an estimated amount of €10M and with the idea of ​​revaluing Renan. He is a footballer, as sometimes happens in Brazil, a timeshare: Zenit owns most of the central defender’s rights and the rest is distributed between Corinthians, Novorizontino and the footballer himself and his agents.

The main obstacle would be, paradoxically, a non-sporting problem. The sanctions of the European Union and the United States for the invasion of Ukraine continue to weigh on football clubs with links to the Russian government. According to them, a Russian club is prohibited from paying an amount greater than $100,000 (€108,000) to any Russian entity or from doing business with personalities or companies connected to Vladimir Putin. Zenit is a club owned by Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled gas company. Even so, an investigation carried out by the Follow de Money journalistic consortium and published by El País revealed two weeks ago that 28 European clubs ignored these sanctions and carried out business with Russian teams, without apparent problems.

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Robert Renan, in action with Zenit Saint Petersburg.NurPhotoNurPhoto via Getty Images

The idea of ​​the loan is the one that Madrid likes the most on all the potential fronts it handles (Renan, Rafa Marín, Varane…) because the club is expecting Militao for the final sprint of the campaign. The entity estimates that the Brazilian centre-back could reappear in March or April, once he has recovered from his crusader operation and has completed the set-up.

That is another of the reasons why Madrid prioritizes a paid loan to buy some of the young defenders with the most projection on the market, such as Gonçalo Inàcio (Sporting de Portugal), Antonio Silva (Benfica) and Scalvini (Atalanta), whose price would never drop below 40 million euros.

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2023-12-23 04:43:21
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