These are the dog days of summer. Sirius rises and falls in tandem with the sun. The triad of Bega, Altair and Deneb pinwheels overhead. Pre-season football has lost its allure, but real kickoff, weeks away fails utterly to lend an urgency to proceedings. And we're all out of good transfer rumours.
After a flurry of early activity, that's bad news for the papers, who rely on transfer clicks and precious quotes to see them through to the beginning of the season. And so stuff gets recycled. Barcelona were supposed to have made a big for David Luiz? Let's have them make it again! Bayern too! We all lap it up. Meanwhile, Chelsea claim exactly what they did a fortnight ago -- that David Luiz is not for sale and is therefore going nowhere.
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It's important to remember that journalists aren't making this up. Think of them as a conduit for stories to be passed through. A player Chelsea consider indispensable being courted by huge named like Bayern and Barca? It's not hard to guess where this is coming from, especially when you consider what David Luiz has in common with Juan Mata, also linked with a move away this summer -- despite the former signing a new deal last season they're both members of Chelsea's core who don't make nearly as much money as some of their peers.
Remember how we were continually linked with a move for Sergio Ramos despite it being obvious that he wasn't coming to Stamford Bridge? Those rumours didn't die until he was given a shiny new contract, and I suspect that we're looking at the inverse this time around.
I'm sure that this is a real leak, but there's a difference between 'something someone told me' and 'the truth'. Everyone has their own agenda, and as we've seen recently, more or less everyone in football is happy to lie to the press to further it. That means that we need to play silly guessing games with transfer rumours, but that's life, I suppose.