To paraphrase the well known advertising slogan for a wood treatment product, this article will be doing exactly what it says in the title.
There’s hardly a shortage of transfer stories regarding Polish football this summer, with Lewandowski’s posturing obviously the biggest and most important (article on that in due course). However, I’ve decided to go with the one-time Legia, and now Dynamo Moscow player, Sebastian Szymański.
Szymański was born in the eastern city of Biała Podlaska and started his youth development at local club UKS TOP-54, before joining Legia’s youth ranks. He played for Legia’s second side before graduating to the full team for the 2016/17 Ekstraklasa season. He impressed in his second season with the team, scoring eight goals in 33 appearances in all competitions, and in 2019 signed a five year deal with current club, Dynamo Moscow. The same year, he also made his debut for the full Polish national team, after having represented his country since the under-15s.
Last summer Szymański renewed his contract for another five years, amongst reported transfer interest from “some Premier League clubs” according to his agent Mariusz Piekarski. More on what Mr. Piekarski had to say this summer later in this article.
This summer, everything is different. As we’ve seen with controversy over the non-selection of Maciej Rybus due to him playing his club football in Russia, it’s not really an option for any Polish player to continue playing there and still be selected for the World Cup for obvious reasons.
A few weeks ago, Piekarski spoke to Meczyki, saying there were a number of Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and Premier League teams after his client. One week ago there were reports from journalist Rafał Sierhej that Piekarski had met with Sevilla sporting director Monchi over a possible transfer. This week, it looks almost certain Szymański will join Hertha Berlin, as per Roman Kołtoń.
With all this uncertainty, it did initially seem like an agent trying to shop his client in the press, but the Hertha stories have gathered pace over the weekend and after reportedly getting Dynamo Moscow to agree to reduce their price from €12 million to €9 million, a deal looks to have been struck between the clubs.
It’s common knowledge that Szymański is on big wages at Dynamo and Hertha are supposedly willing to pay him €2.5 million in wages over the course of the first year of his contract.
Obviously, there is no such thing as a done deal in football until an official announcement, but is does look likely that Hertha will be trying to strengthen after a poor season which nearly saw them relegated. They have a new president in Kay Bernstein, who has promised to run the club in a different way to the heavy investment of the past few seasons, so it will be interesting to see what bearing this has on Szymański’s possible move there.
That’s all for now. For more updates on this story and to know when there’s a new post from me, follow @ekstraklasaexports on Instagram and @ekstraklasaexp on Twitter.
Comments