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SEVILLE, Spain — Monchi has a spare half-hour, just after 8 p.m., after one meeting has finished and another has not yet started. The original plan had been to go for dinner, but it is summer, and Monchi’s plans change a lot in the summer.
Even his spare 30 minutes, it turns out, are not really spare. As Sevilla’s sporting director, who oversees all of the club’s transfer business, this is Monchi’s busiest time of the year. The reason he cannot go for dinner is that, as we speak, he is closing a deal to sell the Colombian striker Luis Muriel to the Italian club Atalanta.