Tottenham make 'insane' Mateus Fernandes claim that will make West Ham laugh

Even Johan Lange, the sporting director at Tottenham Hotspur, accepts that the £85 million deal that took Mateus Fernandes away from West Ham United last summer may look ‘completely insane’ from the outside.

He’s not wrong, either. Yes, Hammers News argued midway through his one and only season in East London that Fernandes had the makings of a £100 million midfielder.

Or at least, he had the raw potential to become a £100 million midfielder somewhere down the line, in the same way a shopping basket full of quality ingredients has the potential to become a Michelin star meal in the right hands.

Following a second successive Premier League relegation, though, the feeling was that West Ham United had taken their old rivals for a ride when Spurs splurged £85 million on a midfielder who, just 10 months earlier, had changed hands for £50 million less.

The Portugal international certainly became a better, more complete, more established operator under Nuno Espirito Santo. But, one year after West Ham forked out an initial £35 million to Southampton, did he really become £50 million better?

Lange doesn’t say. What he does say, oddly, is that there is a limited crop of top-level midfielders available even to clubs willing to invest over £80 million when buying one.

“The prices, to a certain extent, you get used to them,” the former Aston Villa director told Danish magazine Borsen Pleasure. “After all, these are the same amounts that competitors pay.”

If your friends told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it? If your Premier League rivals encouraged you to spend £85 million on a midfielder who finished in the drop zone during both his seasons in the competition, would you pay it?

“All clubs’ scouting networks are so good these days that finding a player that others have overlooked, in a league that no one has heard of, for a tenth of the price, that race is over,” Lange argues.

“[The fees] certainly raise expectations, but it’s not because I think about it every day. I think all clubs think it’s hard to find good players.

“For people who aren’t into football, it might sound completely insane that there aren’t a lot of players to choose from when you have £80 million. But how many players have the quality to justify such an investment?”

Considering that Fernandes is yet to get going under Roberto de Zerbi at Spurs, that £100 million Sandro Tonali has not fared much better, and £85 million Savio has only scored against Charlton in the EFL Cup, that is probably not a great time for Lange to ask that question.

As for his argument about the lack of top-level talent available for less than £80 million, well, how much did West Ham pay for Fernandes in the first place?

Less than half of that. Spurs could have saved themselves a lot of time, and a whole lot of money, if they’d had the bravery to do what West Ham did in 2025 and take an educated punt on a youngster who had impressed in a dreadful Southampton team.

Lange was already in the building by the time of Fernandes’ arrival at the London Stadium. And when he joined Southampton a year prior. Lest we forget, Southampton paid just £15 million to bring Fernandes to England in the first place, when he was struggling to nail down a place in Sporting Lisbon’s XI.

Lange’s insistence that it is now extremely difficult to find ‘a player that others have overlooked’ – in a foreign league for a bargain fee – also rings hollow when you consider that Southampton plucked a little-known Fernandes following a loan spell at Estoril.

Johan Manzambi, Joao Gomes, Mamadou Sangare and Chema Andres also made moves to Premier League clubs this summer for a lot less than £85 million. And all have enjoyed much brighter starts than Fernandes.

So in an interview which Lange clearly used to make some sense of a bizarre summer of overly-inflated transfer fees, it seems he’s only achieved the opposite.