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Wish list Barcelona candidate targets Arsenal's Petit, Overmars
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) -- Joan Gaspart said Thursday that if elected president of FC Barcelona this weekend he will try to lure Emmanuel Petit and Marc Overmars away from Arsenal. Gaspart said he also wants to sign Spaniards Alfonso Perez of Betis and Ivan de la Pena from the Italian side Lazio, the news agency Efe said. He revealed his wish-list three days before Barcelona fans vote to choose between him and Lluis Bassat to replace Josep Lluis Nunez, who resigned in May after 22 years in the post. Gaspart said that if he emerges victorious on Sunday he will travel to London Monday to start negotiating deals to hire Petit, a French midfielder, and the Dutch winger Overmars. Gaspart also said he has no immediate plans to meet with Portuguese winger Luis Figo, which suggests he has given up on keeping him with Barcelona and is resigned to losing him to archrival Real Madrid. Real Madrid's new president, Florentino Perez, said in the runup to the election he won last Sunday that he would hire Figo. He reportedly reached a preliminary deal with Figo's agent and if Figo backs out, he allegedly will have to pay Real five billion pesetas (US$28 million). Figo's contract with Barcelona includes a 10 billion peseta (US$56 million) buyout clause. If Real pays that, Figo would become one of the world's most expensive players. Zinedine Zidane, another star of the recent Euro 2000 tournament and also mentioned as a possible hiring target of Barcelona, was ruled out by Gaspart Thursday, along with Javier Zanetti of Inter Milan and Valencia midfielder Gerard Lopez. Gaspart said their teams had declared them nontransferable. Report: Photographer files complaint against FigoCAGLIARI, Sardinia -- An Italian photographer filed a complaint Wednesday against Portuguese soccer star Luis Figo accusing the midfielder of taking away his digital camera diskette after a confrontation on an exclusive beach on the Italian island of Sardinia, the Italian news agency Ansa reported. Andrea Belmonte was taking photographs of Figo and his wife and daughter, who are vacationing at a hotel on the Costa Smeralda, when the soccer player confronted him around 12:30 p.m. (1000 GMT), Ansa said. Police in Sassari could not be reached Wednesday. According to Ansa, Figo walked off with the diskette containing the photographs, and Belmonte later filed a complaint alleging that the soccer player threatened and acted aggressively toward him. A colleague of the paparazzo, Tony Esposito, said he photographed the incident. Figo reportedly returned the computer chip two hours later after the intervention of his personal manager.
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