Striker dominoes finally falling?

Hello and welcome to another week of transfer madness. The deals have been coming hot and heavy at the start of July, with ones we’ve mostly known about for ages finally happening (Zubimendi), and others going from zero to 100 in basically a week (Madueke).

It’s fun. It’s chaos. It’s transfer season!

First, some programming notes for the rest of the summer.

NEXT WEEK… we’ll start the season gambling previews over on Variance Betting. Things went great last season (there will be free analysis of what happened later this week), and we’re hoping for great things again this season, including on the outrights markets. [The Club World Cup went fine, but MLS has been stubborn and annoying in returning wins, so as always, YMMV. I’ll be over here crying in the corner for a moment.]

EARLY AUGUST: We are doing Premier League Season Previews. These will feature our analysis of all 20 teams as we come into the 25-26 season. Unlocking the previews will be a one-time cost of £10, and it gives you a way to support our writing and our work across a diverse group of authors. We’ll post the sign-up link as soon as we’ve got the structure ready, and you’ll be able to show your love.

• Literally minutes after I published Friday’s blowout column, Nottingham Forest registered a complaint about Morgan Gibbs-White’s potential move to Spurs, and are looking at a legal complaint regarding his formerly confidential release clause.
  
  You know that one person in your friend group who takes everything just a little too far? You probably don’t even like them any more, but you can’t get rid of them at this point because they are now an institution, and because a couple of your friends secretly appreciate the extra chaos they bring to your lives.
  
  That’s Forest.

• Chelsea have allegedly set a £100m for Nicolas Jackson. That feels hopeful, but maybe given the prize money they received from winning the Club World Cup, they’ll stick to it.

• Marcus Rashford to Barcelona has been appearing in the rumour mill for over a year. I think this one works financially, provided United choose to just pay Rashford the rest of his wages, and he signs for Barcelona on a zero-hours contract of €1 per match.

• Now that Manchester City are on a break, they can presumably focus on some outgoings. James McAtee heads that list, with Forest (among others) sniffing around the 22-year old. He looked excellent in a short stint at City last season, but his performances across almost 23 90s for Sheffield United in 23-24 were… not good. Curious to see how this one turns out.

• The Ornacle dropped a bunch more info on Viktor Gyökeres this weekend, seemingly signalling an actual deal is close. My favourite bit was a tasty nugget about Gyökeres’ agent waiving his fee. Given the amount of work this agent does to keep his client’s name in the news, I found this quite surprising. On the other hand, remember last summer when Joshua Zirkzee’s agent fee was initially rumoured to be at £15m (it went down after that)? Yeaaaah, that definitely was not going to fly in this case.

• Newcastle are allegedly in for Hugo Ekitike, as they pre-spend their CL prize money to bolster the squad. Also on their list, Atalanta’s 21-year-old centreback Giorgio Scalvini. It’s good to see the magpies looking a bit further afield than Marc Guehi with their recruitment. I’m sure Paul Mitchell approves.

• Leeds need a new goalkeeper. Their GK last season NEARLY cost them winning the league, so obviously they are out in the market looking for a new one. A prime candidate is Torino’s 28 year old Serbian GK Vanja Milinkovic-Savic. His stats look promising, but they have to contend with Napoli for this one.

• Santi Aouna reports that West Ham are very close to sealing the deal for Slavia Prague’s creative left back El Hadji Malick Diouf.

• There was also a wild report out of France that Liverpool have met with reps of Jean-Philippe Mateta in recent days, which feels like a discount option for them up front. Though they’d be negotiating with Palace, who don’t do discounts.

• Romano had this funky note over the weekend: Real Madrid confirmed to Como that they won’t activate €8m buy back clause for Nico Páz, also formal communication has arrived.

  Como plan to keep Páz this summer and then Real will have €9m buy back clause for next summer.
  
  Patrick and I are both fans of Paz, and it feels like he is destined for bigger things than Como. But maybe not this season?

• The Osimhen to Galatasaray move is weird, right? Tons of teams need a striker, but one of the most high profile ones obviously on the market is locked in on an ENORMOUS-for-Turkey transfer. Something is weird.

—TK

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