West Ham sign Anderson for club record fee
Ronaldo arrives in Turin ahead of Juve unveiling
LONDON, July 15, (AFP): West Ham have signed Lazio’s Brazilian midfielder Felipe Anderson for a club-record transfer fee on a four-year deal, the Premier League side announced on Sunday.
The 25-year-old moves after five years in Serie A to the London Stadium in a deal reported to be around £35 million (40 million euros).
“The deal sees us significantly break our transfer record and we feel it’s a real statement of intent,” said West Ham joint-chairman David Sullivan.
“West Ham is a club with a lot of tradition, lots of great players have played here, like Bobby Moore, Carlos Tevez and (Paolo) Di Canio,” Anderson told his new employer’s official website.
“They were great players and idols here, and I’m aiming big, who knows, maybe I could hit their heights and be a legend here too. I’m really happy to be here. It’s a dream come true.”
The Brazil international joined Lazio in 2013 after making his name with Sao Paolo side Santos as a teenager. The attacking midfielder scored 34 goals in 177 appearances for the Rome club. He is new West Ham manager Manuel Pellegrini’s seventh signing, following those of Ryan Fredericks, Lukasz Fabianski, Issa Diop, Jack Wilshere, Andriy Yarmolenko and Fabian Balbuena.
Cristiano Ronaldo has landed in Turin ahead of his official unveiling as Juventus’ superstar summer signing on Monday afternoon, the Serie A champions announced on Sunday.
“Now arriving in Turin: @Cristiano!” the club wrote on its Twitter account, alongside a photo of Ronaldo with his girlfriend Georgina Rodriguez in front of the private jet that brought him to Italy at Turin’s Caselle airport.
Juventus then posted a video of the plane landing and the player stepping down from the plane his entourage before being whisked off by club officials in a car with blacked out windows.
Ronaldo was expected to land in Italy on Monday morning after surprising the world and asking for a 100 million-euro ($116 million) move from European champions Real Madrid, with daily Repubblica reporting that as many as 20,000 fans were expected to greet him at the airport.
However Ronaldo, who won four of the last five Champions Leagues with his former club, will now head for the Allianz Stadium for medicals on Monday before facing journalists’ questions at a media conference scheduled for 1630 GMT.
Former Spain World Cup winner Fernando Torres, who has signed for Japanese side Sagan Tosu, said Sunday he will do his best to lead the team to victory in the J-League.
The former Liverpool, Chelsea and Spain striker, who left Atletico Madrid this summer after returning to his boyhood club in 2015, will wear the number nine shirt for Sagan.
“I’m going to give 100 percent. I’ll always work hard,” the 34-year-old Torres told reporters in Tokyo.
“I want to help my team win, which is the most important thing,” he said.
Torres said he had received many offers but chose Sagan as they were the first one that showed “true interest.”
He also added that playing at Sagan will be a “challenge” from both a football and cultural point of view.
Torres’s transfer to Sagan comes after fellow Spaniard Andres Iniesta signed for J-League rivals Vissel Kobe before the World Cup. Iniesta’s move arguably represented Japanese football’s biggest transfer coup, with many top players instead now moving to cash-rich Chinese clubs in the twilight of their careers.