Pep Guardiola reveals Tottenham player was ‘on list’ of potential Man City January targets

Pep Guardiola has revealed Pedro Porro was ‘on the list’ of potential players to replace Joao Cancelo in January, although the Manchester City manager said he never really considered the full-back as a transfer target.

Instead, the Spanish defender ended up swapping Lisbon for London and joined Tottenham Hotspur on deadline day, in a move that will ultimately earn City £10m as part of the player’s sell-on clause.

City and Spurs meet on Sunday at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and Guardiola was asked ahead of the game if he considered adding an extra defender on deadline day.

“We talked about that but it takes three minutes, the discussion,” he responded. “I said to Txiki ‘we have to take a look’. Yeah we could have gone into the market and paid a huge amount of money for one left-back. Maybe we could have done it but we’ll wait four months and we can do it without a new signing. In the summer we will see.

“We can handle the situation,” he added. “I trust a lot the players I have. If I had the feeling, I would say to my bosses ‘I think we should do this’. When Manuel Akanji happened in the last weeks of the transfer window, I said I had the feeling we needed another central defender for that reason.

“Nathan [Ake] was injured in that time and Ruben [Dias] was injured. I had the feeling, we had the opportunity and we did it.”

Guardiola was also asked about Porro, a player who moved permanently from City to Sporting last summer, and whether it was ever a possibility of bringing the player back instead of him completing a January move to Spurs.

“He [Porro] is perfect to play with five at the back and last season we suffered when we play against them,” said the City manager. “Sporting against Tottenham in the group stage this year [in the Champions League], I saw both games and Pedro Porro played really good.

“No [we didn’t think about signing him]. He was on the list and we would have to pay a buy-back clause and he decided to go to Spurs.”