Resink recalls negotiations with Benfica and speaks of dirty tricks.

Stije Resink, the Groningen midfielder who Benfica tried to sign in the last winter transfer window, recalled the period of negotiations with the Lisbon club.

I received a call from my agent saying that he had been contacted by Benfica. (…) It was for that moment, because they had two injured players [Enzo Barrenechea and Richard Ríos] and they were quite specific.

Resink criticized the way negotiations were conducted on the Portuguese side, with the apparent interference of an intermediary shortly after discussions about salary conditions. “They started talking to my agent about what I could earn. Ten minutes later I received a call from a Portuguese number. An agent who wanted to get involved in the deal and who knew a lot about what we had discussed ten minutes earlier. When there’s a lot of money involved, dirty tricks emerge,” the Dutch footballer stated in a conversation on a podcast on the YouTube channel Supergaande.

Resink spoke of a grueling process due to constantly being in the news when he didn’t even know what was going to happen, but admitted that the possibility of joining Benfica excited him. I didn’t expect anything to happen in the winter, but since it was Benfica, I thought: Let’s go for it. The 22-year-old footballer ended up staying at Groningen and in early March suffered a rupture of the cruciate ligament in his right knee .