29 June 2023 , 15:21
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Pau Torres has agreed to join former boss Unai Emery at Aston Villa.
The highly-rated Villareal defender has agreed terms on a deal - believed to be in the region of £40m - after Emery fought off interest from Bayern Munich.
Torres, 26, played a key role for Emery with the Spanish minnows who shocked Manchester United when winning the Europa League final two years ago.
The centre-half has long been linked with a move to the Premier League - and a switch was first mooted in January, shortly after Emery was installed at Villa Park.
But with Villa confirming European football for the first time in 13 years following their defeat of Brighton on the final day last term, the club needed to add to its resources.
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Emery now has four stoppers who will expect to play - Torres, Ezri Konsa, Diego Carlos and Tyrone Mings.
The England international enjoyed a renaissance under the club’s Spanish boss after being frozen out by Steven Gerrard.
But Torres is a specialist left-sided centre-half and his arrival will undoubtedly raise questions about how Mings fits into the new-look line-up.
Torres himself is expected to fly in for a medical early next week and will then be formally unveiled.
Unai Emery enjoyed a brilliant run with Aston Villa at the end of last season (GEOFF CADDICK/AFP via Getty Images)Meanwhile, former director and club secretary Steve Stride has claimed ex-women’s director of football Eni Aluko ‘should be ashamed’ over her revelations that she deliberately colluded with other clubs to inflate transfer fees.
Former England international Aluko sparked a rumpus with comments during a debate on Declan Rice ’s on-off move to Arsenal.
The former England international suggested that Gunners’ chief Mikel Arteta may have contacted Pep Guardiola, his former employer at Manchester City, to submit a higher bid in order to seal a deal that had been spluttering along.
She said on Talksport: “I think there’s a lot of cat and mouse going on, as a sporting director, I used to do this a lot. I used to call up a club, a big club and say: ‘Right can you put a bid in?’ It would force my owner to put a higher bid in. I used to do it all the time - and it used to work.”
However, Stride, who worked in a variety of roles at Villa Park in a career spanning 35 years with the club, was unimpressed.
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Commenting on twitter, he wrote: “So we are led to believe that Eni Aluko, whilst director of women’s football @AVFCOfficial, got other clubs to put in a bid for players we were interested in to get the owners to offer more money. If true she should be ashamed.”