The Chels

Hopefully this can be the start of Eto'o playing consecutive games to perform consistently.

Not yet. 'Coming shortly' according to the official twitter page which probably means another 20 mins or so lol

Oh god the Daily Star is arguably one of the only papers less reliable than the Daily Mail. Not sure if we can trust either tbh but the Daily Star's reporting of the details in the Salah transfer (£12m) certainly seems a lot more believable. Sidwell?

If only we had met Cavani's release clause in the summer - £55m I believe! I don't think that's too overpriced for a world class 26-year-old who plays in a position we need strengthening and is about to hit his peak. Plus he has a great work ethic so would work well in the high pressing system! I highly doubt PSG would be willing to sell him though. There really don't seem to be many top strikers out there at all now, apart from Costa who has had quite a dip in form recently.

Or else?

Salah is just a replacement for the 2 departing AMs in Mata and De Bruyne. If he didn't come in someone else would have so I don't see why you want to blame him. Even though the majority of fans don't I'd think that if you're looking for someone to blame then it would surely be Willian, who took Mata's place in the starting 11, or Mourinho, who didn't play him much?

No there won't... Like Mourinho said, the club sought a replacement after deciding to sell Mata. It's not as though Salah was bought and then Mata was forced out.

Yeah I don't think they can reject it after accepting. Thinking about the Willian case, after we bid for him Anzhi didn't subsequently reject Tottenham's offer - I don't think they would have been allowed to. They just left it to Willian to decide who to choose. This story seems like typical BS from the Daily Mail.

That's very possible. But what concerns me is that like PSG, I don't think City's Arab owners give a **** about FFP and will do whatever it takes to get around it and so they'd be more than willing to outbid us on Shaw.

Ideally we wouldn't pay more than 20 million, but with United and City both also interested I wouldn't be surprised if the transfer bidding war vastly inflates his price.

Can't exactly believe anything the DM says. After all they were reporting that Mata was in a helicopter a couple of days ago heading to United - took a while to land eh!

Misleading headline. He said he would like to play under Mourinho again but not another team in England out of respect to City.

His site is in English too: http://www.juanmata10.com/index.php?seccion=noticias&id=4102

Haha true. It was more of a 'transfers press conference' than a pre-match one. To be fair the vast majority of those journalists (and I guess the fans too, including me) cared much less about the Stoke game details, and much more about Mata, Salah etc.

Ah right, thanks! Mourinho's interviews for the papers always seem more insightful and revealing.

I think Mourinho did, but Chelsea didn't go through with it and Eto'o was very angry. Sounds very bitter and cringeworthy reading it back now. "Chelsea said they wanted to buy me and then never carried the deal through. I will show that they made a huge and expensive mistake. They will realise it most when my goals dump them out of Europe. We all know that Petr Cech has not conceded a goal for a long time but then again he has not played against me. Playing Barcelona will be a nightmare for Chelsea at the Nou Camp and in London." (http://www1.skysports.com/football/news/11668/2327057/etoo-blasts-blues)

Would be a fantastic signing for them IMO - the kid has it all. Arsenal are becoming almost as bad as us in signing any AM they like though, lol!

Mourinho: "Until the deadline we have to deal with things we are not expecting – like Juan [Mata] and [Mohamed] Salah – or making good decisions for loans. So, until the deadline, we have lots to think about and do." (Guardian) When a manager does a press conference, quite a bit of what they say is held back until the next day's newspapers and none of the papers leak it before then. Is it the post-camera interviews that they agree not to discuss till the next day or something? Anyone know?

Most probably. United fans are often going on about how his career won't go very far into his mid-30s since he takes much longer than the average player to recover from injuries, which he's been getting more of recently, too. A very good player that would no doubt take our team to the next level, but it would be immensely expensive (transfer + wages) and very possibly a bad move in the long-term.

300k/week for 5 years?! He's absolutely taking United to the cleaners (again)!

I don't think Romeu will be much competition for Matic.

Perhaps he's looking to develop a counter attacking system like he did at Real Madrid? Pace isn't much help when you're trying to break down a team that has everyone back defending. And with KDB gone and Mata going, none of our AMs are really capable of defence-splitting passes except Hazard (remember his pass to Oscar against Southampton in the diving incident) but he plays more on the wing.

I think most have come to the realisation that Mata is (/was) not going to be part of Mourinho's plans, and that selling him would be inevitable. But selling him to United, our biggest domestic rival this past decade, may very well awake the 'sleeping giant' which could be to our detriment in the forthcoming seasons. Selling him abroad would have been much more tolerable for the majority of fans, I suspect.

Promoting one of the youth players on loan like Piazon would surely be a better idea than buying another average player (Salah)? On the contrary, you could argue that it would be a healthy buy

Perhaps the board were so willing to sell because of FFP. I can just imagine, though, that UEFA will end up not enforcing it (they're currently being taken to court by the 'Bosman' lawyer over it) or that clubs will find ways around it, like PSG and Man City by whatever means such as sponsoring themselves. It would hurt a lot more knowing that we sold him to United when we could actually have been okay with taking a hit on the transfer fee.