Your Transfer Rumour is Bullshit: Liverpool Favourites to Sign Antoine Griezmann

Liverpool are going to spend the rest of the month being linked with Antoine Griezmann. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. And, really, it almost certainly isn’t. But it’s a fitting capstone to a week’s worth of breadcrumbs, a betting company coming up with the answer Liverpool fans didn’t know they needed.

For the past few days, maybe for the past week now, Liverpool fans have been told that the club is hard at work trying to make moves. Potentially very big moves. Moves that may not come off this month. They’ve been told that, unlike back in the summer, the club are keeping their cards close to the vest.

There have been whispers of a big name mystery signing. A potentially gargantuan signing of the sort that would make fans forget the name Philippe Coutinho. And it’s meant not to be one of the players already reliably linked—it’s not Thomas Lemar or Leon Goretzka or an early-arriving Naby Keïta.

The question all along has been whether there’s any truth in such talk or if it’s just the old adage of nature abhorring a vacuum being proven out. Either way, today Sky Bet stepped up and gave us a name; gave Liverpool fans their mystery man. They made Liverpool favourites to sign Antoine Griezmann.

A name that would make fans forget Coutinho. A move that would be hard to pull off. A player who has been linked in the past but nobody has thought could end up at Liverpool for some time—a player everyone assumed was destined to join Barcelona next summer after failing to move to Manchester United last year.

It probably isn’t true Liverpool are legitimate favourites to sign him. It almost certainly isn’t. If anything, it’s Sky Bet trying to drive business—to get people talking, and asking, and maybe putting down money on a player who probably won’t be going anywhere this month. And yet it really is the perfect answer.

Based on the clues, the crumbs, the speculative and possibly entirely hopeful talk. Antoine Grizmann and not 42 is the answer. And now that Sky Bet have come up with it, we’ll be stuck entertaining the possibility—the horrifyingly tantalizingly wonderful possibility—Liverpool actually are somehow in for him.