Arsène Wenger is doing that thing again. You know, the one where he sends out smoke signals suggesting the club is interested in signing the defensive midfielder that they have needed since time immemorial even though everybody knows at the last minute he’ll crumble and sign another flighty, attacking midfielder and a routine full-back whose greatest use will be to crack jokes in the presence of the club’s overworked medical team to keep their morale up. You see, they’ve “emerged as favourites” to sign the Bayer Leverkusen metronome Lars Bender, a player who was seemingly born just a hop, skip and a jump away from a move to Arsenal. The Mill has a theory, though. Perhaps Wenger’s after the wrong Bender. And no, we don’t mean his twin brother, Sven, who plays for Dortmund. It would be Peak Wenger to sign the Lars Bender currently warming the bench at Fortuna Köln in the third tier of German football, a club who’d happily accept a bag of hard-to-zip-up coats and £500 for him. Now there’s a real Wenger deal.
For a player who it’s fair to assume may have forgotten how to play football in the six months since he last kicked a ball in anger or vaguely in the direction intended, Emmanuel Adebayor is being linked with some very decent suitors. It was Watford and Chelsea last week and now it’s the Serie A leaders, Napoli. His people are in discussions with club suits in Naples, by all accounts. Presumably, they believe he’s exactly the kind of forward who will put the hard yards in alongside Gonzalo Higuaín … all seven of them, before he places his hands on his hips and stares into the middle distance for the rest of the game.
It says here Paul Pogba is going to sign for Manchester United or Manchester City. Why? Because the transfer-speculation-hogging Juventus midfielder was seen eating in a trendy Manchester eatery with friends. Friends who, presumably, still live in Manchester where Pogba spent two years of his life before waltzing off to Turin and joining Juventus. “I love Manchester,” said the midfielder, after stuffing his face in Wing’s Cantonese restaurant. The Mill would like to shoot this one down but a visit to Manchester to see friends? In December? Why not Skype them and avoid the gloom? Hmmm. Maybe he was was visiting Gary Neville. Expect him to sign for Valencia.
Sergio Agüero is hopelessly sentimental. The kind of person you expect would hold on to an out-of-date tin of spaghetti hoops given to him by a loving family member rather than bin them due to the guilt it would cause. And that’s why he’s off to play for Indendiente. Ah, but in 2019. If he still has any hamstrings left he’s vowed to return home to Argentina – perhaps with a red rose clamped between his teeth – to play for the club he supported as a boy when his City contract ends. In 2019 the Mill fully expects Manchester City to be playing in China and to have cloned Agüero so they can sell him like Disney merchandise at Christmas.
Barcelona are, apparently, so broke they might not be able to put any food on the table this Christmas. So they may have to wrap up their best players and flog them at market like prime pieces of meat. Imagine the queue? It could even be bigger than the one outside Games Workshop in Basingstoke when they introduced a new range of Beastmen. So The Mill is going to bold up the names of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suárez and juxtapose them neatly with Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea and, hmmm, who else is rich? Ah, PSG. Painfully predictable, we know.
And one of Chelsea’s collection of bright, young things that will never so much as get the faintest whiff of the first-team, Charly Musonda, wants to leave. And it says here that loads of clubs, including Monaco, would like to sign the racy 19-year-old midfielder unless Chelsea act quick and hide him away on loan with all the other youngsters they’ve scattered around Europe like clues in a Dan Brown novel.
