We start this morning with Tottenham Hotspur, who are poised break the bank with an £Infinity sextuple-swoop for Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davey, Dan’l Whiddon and Harry Hawke. Not really. But Daniel Levy is going to get a really moderate pat on the head from Joe Lewis, which is basically like winning a trophy.
He will then set about resolving his club’s nascent wage-crisis. It seem like Danny Rose will be forced to leave after accidentally behaving in such a way as to make his position untenable. His appalling audacity in speaking honestly looks likely to be punished by a move to Manchester United, where he will earn more money and be more likely to win trophies; it is possible that Luke Shaw will move in the other direction, though such a manoeuvre is fraught with difficulty.
Down the East Lancs Road, Liverpool are looking at Luan, the Grêmio forward imaginatively dubbed the “new Ronaldinho”. He is in the final year of his contract and has, apparently, been “talking with several European clubs”, one of them thought to be Spartak Moscow. Should he decide that Anfield is not for him, Jürgen Klopp will surely turn his attention to Robbie Keane or Craig Bellamy.
And Klopp is still interested in buying Naby Keïta; happily, his keenly held and earnestly principled objection to astronomical transfer fees is limited to those not paid by him. Keïta’s manager at RB Leipzig, Ralf Rangnick, has again insisted that the player will not be leaving this summer, but noted that, in a year’s time, he will be free to go for a piffling and profoundly moral £48m.
On the other hand Liverpool took just 35 minutes to reject Barcelona’s bid for Philippe Coutinho – where he would link up with former Liverpool player, Luis Suárez. Liverpool, by the way, are not a selling club, though it is only right and proper that those they’d like to buy from are. Anyway, the fee offered for Coutinho, a player who has neither won anything nor played in the Champions League, was £90.3m – or for those who struggle to grasp a number so abstract, 9,030,000,000 cola bottles. This will, though, all be moot should Barcelona persuade Borussia Dortmund to sell them Ousmane Dembélé as they cannot afford both.
Across Merseyside, it now transpires that Ross Barkley might stay with Everton. It was widely hoped that he would join Manchester United to sustain the joy of him saying “Lukaku” on a regular basis, but with no offer from Old Trafford forthcoming, nor anywhere else, there is a fair chance that he will stay put. And Gylfi Sigurdsson is still likely to arrive from Swansea once a suitably appalling fee has been agreed upon.
Meanwhile, Real Madrid’s famously incisive talent scouts have been at it again. Now that Kylian Mbappé is likely to sign for Paris Saint-Germain, they have noticed that Juventus’s Paulo Dybala is also good at football. Secret talks have been held, which is why one can read about them in a column such as this.
Elsewhere, Milan would like to sign Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The Swedish self-effacer actually played for the club between 2010 and 2012, but it is more likely that he will re-sign for Manchester United, who are showing discouraging signs of pace and movement.
Back in England, the game, inasmuch as it relates to Ben Gibson of Middlesbrough, is afoot. Both Southampton and West Brom would like him for their defence, but Boro manager Garry Monk is insisting that he spend a year of his life earning less money for less professional satisfaction. Monk is also upset that the transfer window remains open even though the season has already started, and rightly so; we are, though, lucky that the world has no more pressing issues with which to disturb our equilibrium.