"Frankly" - Norwich City owner makes bold January, Borja Sainz transfer claim | OneFootball

Some big clubs have reported interest in the goalscoring winger.

Norwich City owner Mark Attanasio has said that the club have no plans to sell Borja Sainz in January following his red-hot start to the 2024/25 campaign.

City's Spaniard has emerged as one of the best players in the league this season. With no Josh Sargent available, the added responsibility has seemingly unlocked even more of his goalscoring ability.

Sainz has found the back of the net 11 times in 15 games, in all, and some of those goals, against Middlesbrough in particular, have been absolute firecrackers.

Because of the way that he has set off in this new season, clubs from around the world are now looking at the 23-year-old as a possible transfer target. Athletic Bilbao, from the top division of his home country, are supposedly tracking Sainz, while Turkish giants Galatasaray also have him on their radar.

In Norfolk, their focus with the player is to keep him off of the mounting number of players that are on their injured list and to sort out a new deal for him. Norwich manager Johannes Hoff Thorup revealed that the club's sporting director, Ben Knapper, is looking to sort out some fresh terms for the winger, whose current contract expires in the summer of 2026.

Getting him tied down to a new deal will give them much more bargaining power if they do decide to sell him, but that's not something that they are considering right now, according to the owner of the Canaries.

Mark Attanasio's Borja Sainz, January claim

Attanasio has laid out the club's winter plans for their star Spaniard, in which he stated that they are in no rush to offload Sainz.

The American businessman hasn't been in power long. He agreed a deal with Delia Smith and Michael Wynn Jones in August which would see his Norfolk Holdings group become the majority shareholder in Norwich.

He said at City's AGM on Wednesday evening, on the Sainz, January situation: "We can control what we can control, so we don't need to sell Borja (Sainz) in January.

"Frankly, we don't need to sell him ever, it's just at some point there's an element of fairness, if I understand the ecosystem, where you're getting paid a very full price - it doesn't have to be an extreme price - and it's something that someone wants to do.

"Borja has been great for us. He does everything for us, he runs for 90 minutes. By the way, today I went in and I met everybody who's in the executive, even down to the assistants, and there's a chart for all of the players and the appearances that they have made: nobody in this club has made more appearances on behalf of the club than Borja Sainz.

"And I said 'Well, wow, that's great.' He's working very hard and he's very popular now. I said 'Well, does he ever say no?' And they said 'No, he always goes.'

"He has great character, and so if at some points he wants to move on, you do that. But January would be a little bit too early for us, I think."

Norwich must hold out for ridiculous January offer for Borja Sainz

The Canaries' best shot at making it to the play-offs, currently, is to ride the crest of the wave that the 23-year-old has conjured up. He's the one with the ability to drag this team through the injury-filled mud that they currently find themselves in.

Hoff Thorup wasn't necessarily set up to succeed in the summer, with Gabriel Sara and Jonathan Rowe both leaving the club. Now, with Sargent out for a while, Sainz feels like their only real attacking hope.

As such, they should turn their noses up at anything that they don't consider to be a ludicrously good offer.