The Mail on Sunday suggest that Fulham will need to increase their bid if they want to land Austrian striker Marc Janko.
The paper says that Red Bull Salzburg want in excess of £4m for Janko, who enjoyed a prolific season last year, scoring 39 goals in 36 league matches for Salzburg. Rich has an interesting breakdown of Janko’s campaign last term.
The timing of this story is interesting given that both Janko’s agent and his club denied only a few days ago that the forward was going anywhere. The Mail on Sunday suggests that he has fallen out with Salzburg’s new manager, Huub Stevens, and that they have decided to let him go after they were knocked out of the Champions’ League by Maccabi Haifa last week. We’ll have to watch this one.
Interestingly, in a nod to the growing commercialisation of football, enraged Austria Salzburg fans formed their own club in protest at Red Bull’s treatment of their team after their takeover in 2005, when the company tried to claim that Salzburg were ‘a new club with no history’. They stripped the traditional violet from the Salzburg badge (which was replaced with a small pair of wings, familar to Red Bull drinkers everywhere) and changed the kit to red and white. Disgusting.