‘We almost signed Real Madrid star’, says Mngqithi as they rope in another South American

Manqoba Mngqithi revealed how his Mamelodi Sundowns side missed out on an opportunity to sign Real Madrid youngster, Junior Vinicius a few seasons back when they scouted him in the Brazilian Cup as Masandawana have always kept an eye on South American talent, with the likes of Gaston Sirino, Ricardo Nascimento, former players Mauricio Affonso, Ali Meza all coming from that region, and now new signing Erwin Saavedra, who they lured from Bolivia, adds to the list. 

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“We have a very good network of scouts that are doing very good work for us but technology is also helping us because we use data to compare and see if we can can come closer to what we are looking for because we know the key performance areas that we are looking for and we look at all aspects before we can even look at a player,” said Mngqithi.

The Downs mentor mentioned how his side could have secured the services of attacker Luis Diaz back in 2020, but were beaten by FC Porto, and has now advanced his career by joining European and English powerhouse Liverpool.

“We have lost a lot of players and one of them has signed for Liverpool, can you believe it? We should have signed him before he joined FC Porto. We were on top of Diaz and unfortunately we delayed for one or two days and he signed for Porto and now he is playing for Liverpool,” the Masandawana co-head coach said.

He continued: “We have looked at a lot of players and you will think that I am lying when I say even Vinicius was on our list of players that we should have signed and he was not even at Real Madrid. We saw him in the Brazilian Cup and we were trying to chase him and we slept a little bit and the following day he was signed by Real Madrid.”