Your Transfer Rumour is Bullshit: Joe Allen to Sevilla Edition

Joe Allen’s time as a Liverpool player is probably nearing its end. Liverpool would, by most accounts, be more than happy to keep him around as a rotation option, and would even offer him a new deal on that basis, but the 26-year-old would understandably like to be a starter somewhere.

And Liverpool simply cannot gauruntee him that kind of a role, especially given Jürgen Klopp has made a pair of midfielders—Piotr Zielinski and Mahmoud Dahoud—priority targets this summer and Marko Grujic is set to officially arrive in the coming weeks. So Joe Allen will move on following the Euros.

He will take his top-notch work-rate and his technical skill and his smart positional play elsewhere. Perhaps back to Swansea, or maybe to Leicester City. Stoke and Bournemouth and West Brom have been linked, too, though one imagines they would be a harder sell to Allen than Swansea or Leicester.

So. Joe Allen will go. But a new round of rumours linking him with Sevilla and widely being reported as coming from Andalusia’s Estadio Deportivo are bullshit. Not because it’s impossible to imagine Allen fitting in at Sevilla, mind—they were after all rumoured to be looking at him a few months ago.

Rather, this new round of Allen to Sevilla rumours is bullshit because it’s not Estadio Deportivo reporting something that they’ve been told by contacts within the club. It’s Estadio Deportivo passing along a report they read in the English media. And not just anywhere in the English media. In The Sun.

The Sun, better known around these parts as Manchester’s finest fish-wrap, have no insight into the Liverpool end for obvious reasons. And to suggest they have any better insight into Sevilla’s strategy is nearly as big a stretch. Estadio Deportivo, though, may not know they can't be trusted when it comes to Liverpool.

Estadio Deportivo simply saw a transfer rumour involving a club they cover and passed it on. And because of that, a lot of Liverpool fans and tabloid outlets in England began talking about Estadio Deportivo talking about Sevilla being interested in Joe Allen as though it were a real thing and not pure, unadulterated bullshit.

It is. Not because the idea of Joe Allen heading to Sevilla is inherently unbelievable. Rather because the source of this round of Allen rumours is inherently unbelievable. On the other hand, it does provide a useful lesson in one of the ways a transfer rumour can turn out to be pure, unadulterated bullshit.

It’s a useful example of the way rumours perpetuate themselves, of the echo chamber meets telephone game nature of them. One terrible outlet with no insight prints something in an attempt to capture eyeballs. Another outlet, one others might reasonably believe has insight, reprints it. And so it grows.

Joe Allen won’t be a Liverpool player next season. There might even be a slim chance that he does end up at Sevilla given that club's previous reported interest. But this round of the rumour is bullshit.