Savinho left Manchester City as their record sale, and turned up at Tottenham with a different name

Tottenham have signed Savio from Manchester City for an initial £75 million, with £10 million more in add-ons, and the Brazilian has signed a five-year contract. It is the most money City have ever received for a player, and it took more than a year to get done.

The first thing he did was change his name.

Savinho no more

At City he was Savinho. That is the name that sat above the 26 on his shirt for all 84 appearances he made there across two seasons. At Tottenham he will be Savio, the name he was given and the one he wore on loan at Girona, printed above a new number 17.

Players rarely bother. The diminutive belonged to the version of him City bought and never worked out how to use, and he has left it in Manchester.

A year of saying no

Tottenham first went for him in the summer of 2025. City refused, offered him a new contract instead, and kept him. He spent last season asking to leave anyway, and Enzo Maresca, who took over at City this summer, did not pretend otherwise when the deal was closing.

“Since day one, he has asked me that he wants to leave,” Maresca said. “It becomes complicated then to convince them to stay.”

The numbers behind that unhappiness are not flattering. Savio played 24 Premier League matches last season and started seven of them, scoring once and setting up one. For a winger bought in 2024 as one of the players City expected to build around, seven league starts in a season is close to a verdict.

City will bank at least £80 million, since £5 million of the add-ons are effectively guaranteed. Their previous record sale was Julian Alvarez to Atletico Madrid in 2024. Selling a 22-year-old winger for more than that, to a domestic rival, is not the kind of business a club in City’s position usually chooses to do. Maresca appears to have decided the alternative was worse.

What he is walking into

Spurs paid this money three days after losing 3-0 at Brentford in their opening match of the season, a game Roberto De Zerbi finished by asking for time. His new captain Micky van de Ven missed it injured, Pedro Porro was still catching up after the World Cup, and Mateus Fernandes, an £85 million signing of his own, started on the bench with a calf problem.

So the squad Savio joins is expensive, incomplete and one match into a season that has already gone badly. He said the move was “a wonderful opportunity at a brilliant club with one of the best managers in the world”, and that “it’s taken a while”, which is the more honest half of the quote.

Omar Marmoush is expected to follow him out of City and into north London. We reported on Monday that he was in the capital for a medical, and reports put Tottenham’s summer outlay close to £400 million once that one lands. Whether a squad assembled this quickly can be coached into a team by Christmas is a separate question, and it is the one De Zerbi will be judged on.

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