Sporting Lisbon have hit back at claims from West Ham co-owner David Sullivan that the Portuguese club had accepted a bid for midfielder William Carvalho on deadline day, but that it was too late for a medical to be carried out.
“David Sullivan lies,” Sporting’s director of communications, Nuno Saraiva, wrote in a revealing Facebook post.
“At Sporting, as has already been said by our president, no proposal has been made for the player William Carvalho.
“The football industry is not the set of an adult film in which all obscenities are allowed.
“So the boss of a club demands a lot more than this intellectual pornography.
“Mr David Sullivan has a duty to prove what he says. That is why Sporting challenges him to publicly show the proposals he claims to have made as well as the evidence that Sporting received them.
“One thing is certain: Sporting, has already been said, does not cut legs to its athletes. But we have nothing to do with the performance of entrepreneurs or relatives who live at the expense of players and who are offering them a club at a club price, without a mandate, as if they were cheap supermarket merchandise.
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“Athlete and the club, and creating regrettable situations that have already forced the Sporting to take drastic measures to defend these characters who parasitise the lives of some players.”
The post comes in response to a statement from Sullivan released on the West Ham website on Friday which read: “Late last night Sporting Lisbon made contact to accept the original offer, but unfortunately it was just too late in the day, and we simply did not have enough time to put the player through a medical.“
The Hammers, who brought in Joe Hart, Pablo Zabaleta, Marko Arnautovic and Javier Hernandez over the summer, were also chasing a deadline day deal for Barcelona’s Andre Gomes, though there were no more incomings at the London Stadium.
