Liverpool and Arsenal transfers ‘announced’ and ‘decided’ TODAY | OneFootball

However uneasy we might be feeling about this World Cup, we urgently need the matches to get going now to save us all from terrible content.

There is just an unholy quantity of transfer guff in here today.

And the one mention of the World Cup that gets in made Mediawatch do a sick in our mouth.

So, you know, fair warning.

Long Kon

We will always doff the cap to this headline trick. The Mirror deploy it perfectly today. Sorry, TODAY.

That ‘Liverpool transfer’ would be Ibrahima Konate joining Real Madrid. We see you, Daily Mirror. Don’t look at us like that. You know what you did.

Decision time

Football.london clearly have a new favourite thing, based on a selection of recent headlines.

Obviously the absolute key here is that in absolutely none of these stories has anything actually been ‘decided’.

Or more accurately, we suppose, nothing in these stories has been ‘decided’ by anyone in a position to actually decide on the matters at hand.

That the headlines might accidentally make it look like the stories contain viable content about things actually happening is just sheer bad luck, we’re sure.

Let’s trundle through the formalities, if we must. Morgan Rogers to Arsenal has been ‘decided’ by three journalists, two of whom have said ‘Yes, Arsenal should sign Morgan Rogers’ and one who has said ‘No, Arsenal should not sign Morgan Rogers’. Mediawatch humbly contends that even on its own flimsy merits this story doesn’t ultimately have appeared to ‘decide’ a matter where one writer calls it ‘an easy yes’ and another calls him ‘the wrong attacking option’.

Nobody here, interestingly, is giving any thought at all to any role Aston Villa might have in ‘deciding’ any of this. Only Arsenal matter here.

Mar Cucurella’s future is similarly ‘decided’ by a panel of three who again ‘decide’ the matter by disagreeing about it.

Xabi Alonso’s first blockbuster signing has been ‘decided’ by Glen Johnson, who has ‘decided’ they should sign Julian Alvarez which helpfully also constitutes a ‘£120m Arsenal transfer hijack’. To be fair, it doesn’t seem the worst idea we’ve ever heard.

Are Chelsea actually in the business of signing Julian Alvarez, though? Given that rather than being ‘decided’ as a Chelsea signing or sufficiently Arsenal-bound to really count as a hijack, he is in fact most likely heading to Barcelona?

An interesting concession from the writer here given it’s a ‘decided’ Chelsea signing and an ‘Arsenal hijack’.

Very loosely, we would contend.

As for Spurs, meanwhile, that ‘decided’ transfer is the long-touted Savinho from Man City and perhaps the best of the lot because it’s been ‘decided’ entirely by one writer – not even a panel of three – concluding at the end of a bog-standard ‘reportedly’ heavy news story that:

Mediawatch has ‘decided’ something, but we’ve been advised we’re not allowed to use that kind of language.

Leak soup

A pure housery of a headline from the Mirror here as Virgil van Dijk talks about Arne Slot.

We can at least all agree that the reports that emerged about Slot’s Liverpool departure before it was confirmed do at least qualify for what everyone understands the word ‘leaks’ to mean. Shouldn’t mean much, but after two days in which it’s meant ‘FIFA officially announcing something on the day they said they would announce the thing’ we must be grateful at least for that.

So we can move swiftly on to ‘confession’. Because, and this won’t surprise you, there is absolutely nothing from Van Dijk that comes close to even an admission, never mind the even more loaded confession.

We’ve read and re-read Van Dijk’s quotes and as far as we can tell the Mirror are genuinely using ‘confession’ – a word that specifically means an admission of crime or wrongdoing – to refer to Van Dijk learning of Slot’s departure via the aforementioned leaks.

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again, it will have no impact on anything, but nevertheless: words have meanings.

Censory deprivation

Just in case everything else – up to and including the organisers latest little money-grabbing about-turn and broken promise – hasn’t managed to put you off this World Cup, we put it to you that this one will do it.

Bear in mind that when a bleary-eyed Mediawatch switched on our laptop this morning, these were literally the first words we saw.

Might be a new record for just how quickly we’ve reached ‘That’s enough internet for today’ status.

At least it consolidates the three of them into one manageable, must-avoid show.