Madrid, August 8 (TNS): Croatian footballer Mateo Kovacic has been looking for a transfer to the English football club Chelsea, albeit Real Madrid manager Julen Lopetegui said\u00a0 on Wednesday that he is keen to retain the player as he is a key player in the squad.<\/p>\n
The manager further stated that in case the midfielder decides to leave then the club would look out for “solutions.”<\/p>\n
“There’s nothing 100 per cent certain yet. Mateo has said he wants to leave. I want him to stay – he’s an important player. We’ll see how everything ends up,” said Lopetegui.<\/p>\n
“If he happens to leave, we’ll look for solutions,” he added.
\nElaborating on the “solutions” he is talking about, the manager said that if Kovacic leaves then the club would find a top quality replacement.<\/p>\n
“The solutions are something we’d speak about privately within the club. If Mateo does leave, a player of his level, which is extremely high, we’ll have to look for someone at that type of level,” he said.<\/p>\n
“To reach all of our objectives we need to have a balanced team and he holds a very important position in our midfield,’ he added.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Lopetegui dismissed the reports of Belgian goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois joining the club saying that the team is content with their current goalkeeper Keylor Navas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Madrid, August 8 (TNS): Croatian footballer Mateo Kovacic has been looking for a transfer to the English football club Chelsea, albeit Real Madrid manager Julen Lopetegui said\u00a0 on Wednesday that he is keen to retain the player as he is a key player in the squad. The manager further stated that in case the midfielder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74965,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74963"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74968,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74963\/revisions\/74968"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/74965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}