Why Rafael Leao might struggle to find a buyer

Welcome to June! It is both a transfer month and a World Cup month this year, which should be a source of great excitement for all of you.

Before we dip into a rumour mill catch up, I wanted to talk through some content updates and answer a few questions we’ve been receiving around these parts.

Variance Betting and the World Cup

We’ve been on a heater to start the MLS season, but now that league is on break for… the World Cup, MANY of you have asked whether we will be producing gambling analysis for the FIFA spectacular. Given the tournament offers the best value to smart bettors of any competition on the calendar, I can confirm that we are definitely going to write about the World Cup on Variance Betting.

If you would like to sign up to follow our efforts, click here. We’ll do Outrights analysis early next week to tell you which teams we think are over and underrated, and then we’ll cover day by day matches as the tournament begins. It should be both weird and wild, as we’ve never seen a World Cup with this many teams and potentially this many huge mismatches.

Speaking of the summer tournament…

We have built a World Cup Bracket Builder! And it’s free.

This is the precursor to new tools we have been building for gambling and team analysis. We’re trying to thread the needle between people who take their gambling very seriously and those who really just want to have a poke around and compare various teams across different capabilities.

Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong, you will get access to the bracket builder on Thursday.

We’ll also be adding a community in the second half of the year, which was probably the most requested feature anyone has asked for since we started aside from “please tell me EXACTLY how you do your gambling so I can copy it for myself.”

Then for the next season we will start to produce the analytical tools I have always wanted, and incorporate model numbers directly into the tools. Big things a’poppin’, so stay tuned.

Transfer Stuff

• Patrick is forcing me to discuss Morgan Rogers to Arsenal on Monday’s podcast against my will, so if you want analysis of that, go here later today.

• Man, that Anthony Gordon deal to Barcelona happened fast, didn’t it? Let’s hope for more of those and fewer sagas this summer.

• Rafael Leao’s agent is desperately searching for a buyer that does not care if his out of possession work rate is among the bottom 10 forwards in Europe. To be fair, Kylian Mbappe is the lowest-ranked player in this index, so it’s not an impossible task. [Mo Adnan has been doing cool work in this realm.] This does explain why Leao’s name is once again spaffed and connected to every big budget team in Europe. And slightly more believable than Dusan Vlahovic.

• Joao Palhinha looks like he’s trying to go back to Portugal (via Bayern), which saves a LOT of Spurs fans I know [Hi Kim!] from further banging their heads on their desks immediately after the Andy Robertson deal.

• “Brazil and Galatasaray midfielder Gabriel Sara, 26, has responded positively to interest from Aston Villa.” If I had to pick a Premier League team that was most likely to be involved with a Brazilian playing in Turkey, it is DEFINITELY Villa at this point. No, I will not be able to clarify.

• Oliver Glasner and Mauricio Pochettino are two fun names who have been linked to the vacant AC Milan job. They also need to fill [checks who was fired or left of their own accord] uh… literally every other job in their sporting department. A busy summer for Zlatan, but he’s clearly qualified to do all these jobs himself at this point.

• Staying in Italy, Juventus are “monitoring” David De Gea, who is 35 years old now and started every Serie A match except the last one for Fiorentina this season. He’s still a good shot stopper.

• Chelsea are interested in 17-year-old attacker Mikkel Bro Hansen of Bodo/Glimt, which fits with the finance bros general recruitment strategy of buying children and signing them up to child labour deals until they are old enough to sire and raise the next generation of children.

• At the TTF Conference I excitedly pitched Hammarby’s Hampus Skoglund as a right back option for Arsenal, a target (and name) that left Patrick 100% convinced I had made him up. So if you see rumours crop up soon… tell Cersei, I want her to know it was me.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, we’d appreciate it if you would forward it to a friend. If you’re that friend, welcome! You can subscribe to The Transfer Flow here. We also have a podcast where we go in depth on transfer news and rumours every week. We’re on YouTube here, and you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify by searching for “The Transfer Flow Podcast.” If you’re interested in football betting, check out this post on why we started Variance Betting.