Report: Tottenham Hotspur bid for Anthony Martial rejected by Manchester United

A wild Tottenham Hotspur transfer rumor report appears! Breaking news on Twitter suggests that Tottenham have had an offer rejected for Manchester United striker Anthony Martial. The report comes from Mohamed Bouhafsi, chief football editor for France’s RMC Radio.

That is, literally, the only information we have at this time. We don’t know how much the reported bid is for, why the bid was rejected (though we can guess), and whether Tottenham remain interested in Martial’s services. Kevin McCauley calls Bouhafsi “the French Di Marzio,” meaning that he’s right about half the time and dead wrong the other half, so we should take this tweet with an entire salt mine.

That said, Anthony Martial? Would. Spurs were strongly linked with him back in 2015 when he was still at Monaco, though United’s interest pretty quickly priced them out of serious consideration. He’s never really gotten going at United under Louis Van Gaal or Jose Mourinho, and is now definitely behind Romelu Lukaku and possibly behind Marcus Rashford in United’s depth chart. The Independent speculated that Spurs might make a summer move for Martial way back in February.

He’d be a pretty fantastic pick-up for Spurs, too — quality backup to Harry Kane and also able to play as an inside forward on either flank. That’s a signing that would make me pretty darned excited.

Now the bummer: it’s kind of hard to imagine that United would want to sell to Spurs without a pretty phenomenal offer, what with them being direct rivals and all. But at the very least this might be a statement of intent from Tottenham that they’re finally ready to get serious about incoming transfers. Assuming, y’know, that it’s not complete bulls—t.