Insigne Speculation Likely Pure Fabrication

The summer transfer window truly is a marvel of guesswork and conjecture. Players will be moving clubs, and if an outlet throws enough mud at the wall, at least one wild guess is likely to stick, proving that broken clock idiom true yet again, and providing the media in question with a certain sense of legitimacy, however fleeting.

Transfermarketweb, the English-language edition of Italian website Tuttomercatoweb, remains one of the very worst offenders of this particular brand of rumour mongering, to the extent that the headlines might as well be purely auto-generated at this point. Producing a never-ending stream of seemingly unrelated player and club names, backed up by nothing in particular, it is inevitable that Liverpool, one of the top ten clubs in the world, will pop up on the site now and again.

On Thursday, the algorithm has paired the Reds up with Napoli attacker Lorenzo Insigne, with several outlets across the country picking up the story, attaching the detail of a €60m price tag that appears nowhere in the original text. While Insigne is a good player entering his prime and coming off an excellent season playing in a system and position that is not dissimilar to what he would undertake at Anfield, and while the Reds are most definitely looking to add pacey and creative depth to their frontline, there is no reason to believe these reports are anything other than the latest fabrication of RumourBot2k18.

Finally, there is nothing to suggest Napoli would be willing to part with their diminutive talisman and unofficial vice-captain, a Naples-born ciucciarelli fan since boyhood who has climbed the ranks of the club he first joined at 15. Thus, Liverpool fans who were struck with hope to see the 5’4” attacker run at defenders in red next season will in all likelihood be left disappointed.

Not to worry. There will be another one tomorrow.