porting Lisbon
According to an English newspaper report, Manchester United are trying to engineer a partnership with Portuguese club Sporting Lisbon.
It is understood that two of Sporting’s directors, Miguel Ribeiro Telles and Jose Bettencourt, flew to Manchester today to have talks with United Chief Executive Peter Kenyon over the possibility of a shared academy system.
If talks are successful, a similar deal could be made to one that already exists between the Old Trafford club and Royal Antwerp of Belguim.
Such a deal may have been prompted by United’s assistant manager Carlos Queiroz, who is a former coach of Sporting, while the Reds have been linked in recent weeks with Sporting’s teenage sensation Ricardo Quaresma.
United boss Sir Alex Ferguson has already explored the possibility of links with South Africa’s Cape Town FootballAcademy, while there is already a financial agreement between the New York Yankees baseball team and Manchester United.
