Afternoon, all.

I’m off work today, and at something of a loss. Instead of bimbling about being unproductive, I decided an extra special bonus post was in order. With competitive football absent, and only endless speculation and spurious rumour to occupy our time, I thought I’d take you through the steps of making your very own transfer rumour.

Step 1:

No transfer rumour would be able to flourish without a player. In order to gain attention and views, you’ll need either a big name superstar or a unknown Brazilian. The big name stars are easy to find. Obscure Brazilians are easy to invent – simply place ‘inho’ on the end of any dull British name. For example, Fredinho, Bobinho, Peteinho, Geoffinho…

Step 2:

Find a club down on it’s luck with a fortune to spend, or a newly acquired Arabian billionaire intent on playing Football Manager in the real world. As it happens, Arsenal are one of those clubs who just happen to have an alleged fortune at their disposal.

Step3:

Use a quote. You can approach this two ways. Firstly, you can claim to have a source (whose name you couldn’t possibly reveal) inside the club and invent whatever wild-eyed dross you can think of. I could say my nameless and genderless ‘source’ inside Arsenal regularly talks to the players about personal details of their life, and he tells me Gervinho said this recently:

“I am currently looking at property in Macclesfield as they have an exemplary ratio of Starbucks’ in the main high street”

Alternatively, you can take an actual player quote like this from Edison Cavani:

“I don’t know, I think that there are other factors that could change my future. I have a contract with Napoli but on the other hand there are conversations but everything is uncertain at the moment”

Remove everything except the words you want to use, leaving you with this:

Contract, future, uncertain, Napoli, conversations.

And you just add a few choice words of your own to make in sound more interesting:

“I’m unhappy with my contract and my future is uncertain. I hope Napoli will have conversations with other clubs”

Step 4:

Create an entirely inaccurate headline. This is the most important part. Making a headline that’ll get noticed will attract hits, and hits are gold in the online community. Using a completely made up figure, and incorporating one of the clubs reported to have cash, you can conjure up the following:

Cavani opens door to £56m Arsenal transfer and slams Napoli.

Using the above fabricated Gervinho quote that a ‘source’ has given you, hits can be attracted by using a little of the “2+2=4” theory:

Gervinho puts Macclesfield Town on high alert as he’s spotted looking at houses in the area.

And if you really want to get creative, you can use a mixture of the above to make your very own sensational and exclusive rumour. That would include this headline:

Arsenal set to break world record for 4 Brazilian starlets

Followed by this story:

An inside source at Arsenal’s London Colney training ground saw Arsene Wenger’s iPhone, and read a text message to Dick Law telling him to bid £4567m for Brazilian super-kids, Bobinho, Fredinho, Peteinho and Geoffinho.

Including a quote from Arsene Wenger about anything remotely relating to Brazilian football, such as this:

“Andre Santos is Brazilian”

Changed to this:

“We are looking at Brazilian players. We will conduct our business in private, and let you know the moment anything is finalised”

Before you know what’s happened, your blog has received 100,000 hits in 20 minutes, and the owner of Caught Offside is ringing on a daily basis to offer you the position of chief researcher. The world is your oyster.

Just remember who gave you the tips.

Thanks for reading today (again), you beautiful bastards. See you in the comments for discussions, thoughts and probably a fair bit of abuse directed at me for being stupid. I deserve it…