Andre Villas-Boas has denied that a deal has been agreed for the sale of Gareth Bale to Spain’s Real Madrid.

Recent reports suggest Bale could be closing in on a world-record transfer to the nine-time European champions, but Villas-Boas denied that was the case.

“That is not true,” the Tottenham manager said from Tbilisi.

The north London club would not comment, however, on claims that technical director Franco Baldini was in the Spanish capital for talks over Bale’s future.

Bale sat out the first leg of Tottenham’s Europa League play-off against Dinamo Tbilisi yesterday, officially because of an injury to his foot.

While Bale has been recovering, Tottenham have spent £60 million on four new signings and they could shell out that same figure over the next few days to land Willian and Erik Lamela.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the reasoning behind the uncharacteristic record splurge by Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy.

One is that he wants to bring the stellar signings in to persuade Bale to stay and the other, more popular, one is that the chairman is already spending the cash the world-record fee that the Londoners would receive if the Welshman left for the Bernabeu.

Villas-Boas was asked which one was the case and he was reluctant to say that the new signings had been bought in order to try to tempt Bale to stay.

“Ideally we want to keep everyone to make us stronger – that is the ultimate objective of the club,” the Spurs manager said.

“In the end, anything can happen. We are dragging ourselves into the last weeks of transfer activity and it can become very, very frantic.”

Spurs expect to complete the signing of Willian by the time they return from Georgia.