Transfer Rumors

It’s not football’s best kept secret, but Atletico Madrid manager Diego Simeone has confirmed that much like Radamel Falcao and Diego Costa before him, 26-year-old center forward Antoine Griezmann will be allowed to leave the club for “a once in a lifetime chance to play for a certain team.”

Mexican international winger Hirving "Chucky" Lozano is lighting the Eredivisie in his first season in Europe with PSV. The 22-year-old has 11 goals in 14 appearances in all competitions for the Dutch side, and from the looks of it he's just getting started.

“For f**k’s sake. Have you got nothing else to talk about?” was Neymar’s recent response when asked about wild speculation linking him with a transfer to Real Madrid. No, is now the Spanish media’s resounding answer.

Could Robert Lewandowski be the latest European star to make a move to MLS? According to his wife, Anna Lewandowski, the couple dreams of a move to Los Angeles and a chance to build their personal brands ahead of Robert's retirement.

"I think we will spend some time in the United States, too," Anna Lewandowski said in a recent interview with Business Insider Poland. "We dream of Los Angeles. There we want to develop our brands."

Here at The18, we typically steer clear of transfer rumor nonsense fueled by nothing more than the strange fancies of dubious websites because we’re not hacks. That’s why our award-winning staff is so often likened to German dachshunds with regards to the transfer market — we sniff out the nonsense and we piss on it.

Will Spanish striker Fernando Torres finally join Major League Soccer? This is the rumor that has everyone’s heads spinning. It started when fans noticed “El Niño” listed as a player on the official MLS website. Last time I checked, it’s not April Fools' Day so this is either a major transfer leak or the biggest hoax in MLS transfer rumor history.

Can you imagine Torres playing for an MLS squad? Which club, in such case, would be lucky enough to capture “El Niño”? 

Borussia Dortmund’s sobering 3-1 home defeat to Bayern Munich on Saturday contained only two redeeming qualities according to BVB manager Peter Bosz: the support of the club’s famous Yellow Wall and the play of 19-year-old American attacker Christian Pulisic.

There’s certainly not a whole lot in this — it’s wild January transfer speculation two months before the window opens from dubious sources — except that it kinda makes sense.

How much of Hatem Ben Arfa’s enfant terrible reputation is deserved? It’s impossible to say, because we don’t know the man. However, with only one-year remaining on his Paris Saint-Germain contract, it’s become clear that Ben Arfa’s exit from the French capital is going to look a lot like his exits from Lyon, Marseille, Newcastle United and Hull City.