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Crazy and transfer rumours are natural bedfellows. When it's your job to come up with speculation that might capture the imagination of football fans desperate for any scrap of insight but you don't have any real knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes, it's a rather simple formula to get to the rumour you want to monger.
Step one, identify a need. Step two, pluck the most ridiculously insane solution to that idea out of the air. Rules like that that solution shouldn't involve a rival club's player or a regular starter for a more prestigious side typically apply—so Diego Costa probably isn't in play—though with enough work even they can be gotten around in a pinch.
For Liverpool, the problem is simple: they can't score goals. If one were to look to frame that issue in the most simple way possible, they would add in that the club's £16M summer answer to scoring goals—namely, Mario Balotelli—isn't working and that they have a potential answer—namely, Divock Origi—on the books but out on loan.
Looking at it, then, the correct answer—the craziest rumour mongering answer to how Liverpool solve their problem—is deceptively, brilliantly simple. The answer is that Liverpool offer Balotelli to Lille this January in exchange for the French club allowing Origi to head to England immediately rather than in the summer as originally planned.
In a way, it's surprising that it's taken this long for anyone to suggest it, but now the Express has and this rumour—this brilliant, stupid, impossible rumour—is out in the wild. Liverpool will, of course, not send Balotelli to Lille in January—probably on loan but that doesn't really matter—in exchange for them ending Origi's loan early.
But that doesn't really matter, either. What matters is that in the land of spurious transfer rumours, we have been gifted a new gold standard for the crazy, the ridiculous, and the just plain not-gonna-happen. Mario Balotelli to Lille. In January. For Divock Origi. It's perfect. It's stupid. It's never going to happen. So enjoy it for what it is.
