Leny Yoro and other top PL transfer targets it’s okay to admit you’ve never seen play

Okay, fine, we know there are some of you out there who really do watch a legitimately frightening quantity of football from a terrifyingly wide range of territories and standards. If that’s you, please feel free to scroll merrily past without taking offence that was never aimed in your direction.

But there are then also the rest of us, who so very often feel the need to have a strongly developed opinion on every single player out there, especially if those players are being linked with high-profile big-money moves to clubs in Our League.

Seriously, though, guys. It’s okay to admit you’ve never seen any of these lads play and have absolutely no idea whether they really are any good.

Leny Yoro
Yes, yes, it’s undeniably a huge coup for Manchester United. Well done. But it’s a huge coup because Real Madrid wanted him and PSG wanted him and Liverpool wanted him and Manchester United got him.

That all points to him being very good at football, sure, but we humbly contend that a large percentage of those shouting about his ‘levels’ and ‘ceilings’ and attributes have never seen him play a single moment of football outside YouTube highlights reels. And we could do you a YouTube highlights reel that would make the football England played at Euro 2024 look absolutely thrilling.

It says here that Yoro played twice against Aston Villa last season, which is an absurd lie. Clearly we would all have seen that if it happened. Also, what the heck is a ‘Europa Conference’?

Any images purporting to show Yoro up against England semi-final hero Ollie Watkins are we can only assume deep fakes.

We also very much enjoyed Manchester Evening News man and Mediawatch stalwart Samuel Luckhurst’s suggestion that United’s move for Yoro has ‘raised eyebrows’ at Everton who wanted them to put up that cash for Jarrad Branthwaite instead.

Now we suspect some pretty significant levels of mischief-making on the part of Luckhurst, but we’re grateful for two reasons. One, it distracted Everton Twitter from calling us names over some throwaway things we said about Jordan Pickford, and also because the replies are now absolutely full of people declaring Yoro to be better than Branthwaite or having a higher ceiling than Branthwaite based, we would contend, in almost every case on very literally nothing more than their club having signed one and not the other. We do love to see it.

Vanderson
Come on, you can’t expect to convince anyone that’s a real footballer. A quick Google reveals Vanderson is also the name of ‘one of the most recognisable creators of the Polish electronic music scene’ and that sounds a far, far more plausible use for the name Vanderson than ‘Monaco and Brazil right-back’.

Vanderson is a regen name once you’ve stopped putting any effort into regen names. It’s just Anderson with a V on the front, isn’t it? Feels like a data entry error, and he was actually supposed to be a Dutch player called Van der Son.

Some pretty sh*t content there about funny foreigners and their funny names there. But we’re still not having that he is actually a real footballer who exists outside VANDERSON – WELCOME TO NAPOLI | 2024 BEST SKILLS SHOW | HD videos, Ligue 1 being essentially an invisible league that ends up being won by PSG nine times out of 10 and amusingly yet still crucially invisibly not won by PSG one time out of 10.

Has apparently also played six minutes at right-back for Brazil, but come on now, who hasn’t? Playing six minutes at right-back for Brazil makes him precisely 1.19 per cent as good a footballer as Emerson Royal. That’s just maths, and you can’t argue with maths.

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Samu Omorodion
Chelsea have been linked with a big-money move for the Atletico Madrid man because of course they bloody have.

Scores huge points in the ‘big-ticket transfer type nobody has ever seen’ by being a 20-year-old player at a legitimately massive club but never actually yet playing for that club, having signed for Atletico Madrid last year and immediately gone on loan to the far less noticeable Alaves.

And those points are now doubled by the fact he’s part of the Spain squad for the Olympics, the most forgettable and ignorable football tournament ever conceived. A football tournament that even the most ardent football fan on earth will ignore because there’s round one of the canoeing and then some BMX heats on at the same time.

Didier Baptiste
Liverpool are apparently in pole position to complete a bargain £3.5m move for the highly-rated Monaco and France U21 left-back, described in various reports as an ‘attractive player’ we’ll be ‘seeing a lot more of’ who would represent an ‘ideal addition to Liverpool’s back four’.

If you know you know.

Antonio Nusa
The first alarm bells here are the fact he’s Norwegian. That’s just too on the nose these days, you can’t just sneak a Norwegian past us anymore. Not with your Haalands and Odegaards and the Oscar Bobbs of this world making a real, identifiable splash in English football. You know, like in the Premier League and stuff: the proper football that we can see.

He plays for Club Brugge, and while we’re all keen followers of the Jupiler Pro League here we cannot honestly say we’ve ever seen him play a single minute of actual football. We’re not saying you haven’t. Maybe you really did catch and were suitably impressed by his 15-minute Champions League cameo off the bench against Benfica in the 2022/23 last 16. Fair play to you, you’ve got a good eye.

But whether he would be a good signing for any of the weirdly apparently exclusively London-based clubs who’ve been linked is not a question we can answer for the supporters of Spurs, Chelsea, Brentford or Crystal Palace. Luckily, they don’t need us to. They’ve already declared him the missing piece of the puzzle, the summer’s top target, mid, or a complete waste of money to be avoided at all costs and what on earth are the club even thinking looking at him it sends a really worrying message about the transfer committee and the type of player they’re targeting actually…