Over and over again, I find myself having to write these lines.
Over and over again, I am forced to write about how a Moussa Dembele transfer story is based on nothing but nonsense. TalkSport are running this one; as per usual they nicked it from somewhere else, a clickbait site in France which is claiming an exclusive. And that exclusive is very weak.
According to them their local “sources” have said that talks have been had between Marseille’s reps and Dembele’s agents. The same report says that no bid has been submitted to the club, so I ask you; if their agents were talking to his agent and putting deals on the table, and our club had not even been given the courtesy of a call … what would you call that?
I would call it illegal tapping.
I would say it was an issue our club should be taking up with UEFA. And having slapped a “not for sale sign” on the player just last week that’s exactly what I would have expected us to do. The article contains no quotes, the “sources” are not named, nobody from either club has commented. The story has no basis in fact.
The story is, to use the Glasgow vernacular, absolute bollocks.
This time last week, when the Marseille story first surfaced, the reports said we were ready to let Dembele leave on loan as long as there was a pre-agreed purchase price. Have you ever heard such clear-cut garbage as that in your life?
This is the same story, with a few refinements. It is shoddy “journalism” at its running worst and not one bit of notice should be paid to it.
People have been getting mileage out of “Dembele to leave Celtic” stories since the day and hour Dembele was signed by our club. This is another one of them, one that has given some sites a good day of hits. Celtic fans need to stop reading this, and believing, this kind of outright nonsense.
I don’t know how many emails I get a day asking if this story or that story is true; even Christmas Day offered no respite as I had to spend an hour chasing down Sky’s ludicrous, utterly false, story that Dembele had been sold to Brighton.
I wonder if the same “sources” were behind this story, this tittle-tattle, this pure fiction.
It’s shocking that such a non-story has leapt into the mainstream press via TalkSport when it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to back it up.