To improve his rickety defence and demonstrate Liverpool’s determination to win the Premier League, there is no better signing Jürgen Klopp could makeOnly three players in the Premier League have the ability, when at their awesome best, to make everyone else on the pitch look like immature creatures, toddlers trying and failing to compete with giants. Two of those players are on the wane – Yaya Touré and Zlatan Ibrahimovic – but the other should be approaching his prime. If Liverpool sign Virgil van Dijk they will be making the ultimate upgrade to their team.On one level it could be argued that to splurge £60m or thereabouts on any player is to blare a huge scouting or coaching failure, since a...
The club Sir Alex Ferguson called ‘that mob’ over Cristiano Ronaldo look to be after Manchester United’s goalkeeper and Chelsea’s Eden Hazard – but the Premier League duo should stand firmIt isn’t difficult to understand why there are times when Real Madrid, with all their haughty self‑importance and the inescapable sense that they always seem to get their way, leave some of the other clubs at the higher end of the sport filled with moments of insecurity.There are plenty of other great clubs who regard European domination as a legitimate ambition. Yet none, perhaps – not even Barcelona – have the same kind of magnetic attraction for the game’s superstars. None of the other superpowers seem so sure of themselves,...
The Bayern midfielder increasingly looks a candidate for the title of most startlingly strange meteoric 24-month first-team career ever. Wonderkids bewareAmong the many doomed and dreadful writing projects I occasionally pretend to be working on is a Bret Easton Ellis-style football novel about a hip, talented, existentially glazed and clueless wonderkid being passed around Europe’s super-clubs by the shady financial powers that run the world game.The lead character is an interchangeable young star, probably Portuguese, called something generic like Rui Pinto or José Costa. Tattooed and glossed, garlanded with premature honours, his entire private and professional life is owned by a Gestifute-style talent agency. He wears sunglasses and huge headphones and speaks mainly in emojis, while being shuttled from elite...
What stood out when the transfer window closed was the paucity of eye-catching business and how action on the field took precedenceI finally finished the new series of Sherlock this week. It took longer than I anticipated. Maintaining focus on Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman proved difficult as time wore on, the plot became increasingly implausible and the show morphed into a Crystal Maze tribute. Professional critics were unimpressed. Sherlock was accused of turning in the worst James Bond impression since Jez slept with Mark’s future mother-in-law in Peep Show. There was inevitable and potentially fatal talk of jumping the shark.It happens to the best of them. The Wire rather lost its way with series five and Scott Templeton. Ricky Gervais...
Celtic do not need to sell and the striker is not agitating for a move but the money being demanded from Chelsea may not reflect reality – even for a blue-chip assetIf only the valuation of players was an exact science. Instead, issues of fitness, form, the desperation of either the buying or selling club plus contractual status play a part. Sometimes they combine. In a fluctuating player-club power struggle salaries don’t multiply to the extent of desired transfer fee in the case of a meteoric rise. Where Celtic and Moussa Dembélé are concerned, a high price tag links to great debate; should Scottish football’s lowly status negatively impact on the value of a player when pursued from England?What a...