The Shakespeare Wednesday Gossip
The report in this morning's Daily Star that 'Real Madrid could offer £73m plus Fabio Coentrao in exchange for Tottenham wing wonder Gareth Bale' makes plenty of sense in theory. A near record transfer fee and a world-class left-back would be a pretty good return for Spurs but there are a couple of problems with this proposal. The first of course being that it is a 'Player Plus Cash Blockbuster'. Despite their presence in transfer stories being as constant as the northern star, completed swap deals are as rare as a Shakespeare play ending without a number of fatalities.
If this is to be the player part exchange equivalent of Midsummer Night's Dream, one would hope the Star would be slightly more bullish about the deal going through. According to the newspaper, 'Spurs chairman Daniel Levy is expected to turn down a swap bid if a firm offer was put on the table.' Even if yesterday's report in Real mouthpiece Marca that Bale had agreed a six-year deal at Madrid is true, Florentino Pérez will have a devil's own job prising the winger from the clutches of the Tottenham chairman and will probably require more than the £80 million they paid for Cristiano Ronaldo in 2009.
Surprisingly there has been an amusing development in a similarly tiresome transfer saga last night, with various outlets running with a story that may just indicate John Henry and Ivan Gazidis have a sense of humour as well as being fluent in corporate-speak. Per the Guardian, 'Arsenal have reinforced their determination to sign Luis Suárez with a club-record bid of £40m plus £1 for the Liverpool striker.' That extra pound activates a clause in Uruguayan striker's contract that Liverpool must inform Suarez of a club's interest once they receive a bid of more than £40m.
Brendan Rodgers has already stated that the club view Suarez as being in the same bracket as Edinson Cavani who joined PSG for £55.6 million from Napoli and rejected this latest bid. This would seem to be a strange and rather pointless clause to include as it doesn't really force Liverpool's hand all that much. However the nature of the offer though would suggest that Arsenal dispute the fine print of the contract and believe that bidding more than £40 million activates a release clause which would force Liverpool to sell the top scorer in last season's Premier League. Therefore, 'a legal dispute over the wording of the 26-year-old's contract cannot be discounted.'
Henry apparently isn't too worried about any of that legal mumbo-jumbo.
