Jean Michael Aulas, Lyon’s chairman, who’s allegedly charismatic according to reports has revealed that whilst Karim Benzema will most likely stay with Lyon for another year, if he decides to depart, it would be for Madrid.
Don’t trust me? Well, here’s the quote:
“No-one is intransferable, but knowing Karim, if he did leave, it would be to Real Madrid. For the moment, we are not talking about transferring Karim.”
Of course, the obvious question will be, Fergie, are you still interested in him? Why are we still hearing incessant rumours linking us with this player — who, despite his obvious talents, has questionable taste in clubs — yet not even a murmur on cheaper strikers like Huntelaar? Also, he’s erm, French.
Today is Friday, which means another week whizzes past us, with Valencia still looking the most likely signing — assuming Real Madrid agree to add the requested one year supply of hair gel, sun tan, Iberian escorts, into Ronaldo’s contract, by the end of this month. In fact the number of eligible transfer candidates have dwindled over the past week. The under-26 age policy might have ruled out a few targets right away. We mused, a couple of days ago, if United were being naive about it, whilst, Penguin United came up with a theory that it may just be a smokescreen for driving the price for United targets down.
All that said, it sort of rules us out of reckoning for Villa (Spain Lover), Ribery (Madr!d lover), Eto’o (Dirham-lover, City-bound perhaps?) and possibly Benzema. But if we still are in the hunt for Benzema, there’s only one theory that can possibly explain it: We might want to buy him for about £25m and hope Madrid are still foolish to come back and buy him off us for £100m in three years’ time, just two months after Fergie would have said, he wouldn’t sell them a tadpole.
Nothing else explains why Fergie might still want Benzema.
Meanwhile, Manchester United is the 8th best Sporting Brand in the world, according to SportsPro magazine. Predictably American sports brands NFL, MLB, NBA and Nascar grabbed top four spots. But the most interesting entry in that list was the Indian Premier League, a cricket league that is now just two seasons old but is valued just $100m lower than the world cup, according to the Guardian article. From United’s perspective, we are valued at about $1.5bn.
The list also includes Ferrari, Formula One, and the Dallas Cowboys.
The whole list is as below:
1 NFL ($4.5b)
2 MLB ($3.9b)
3 NBA (2.35b)
4 Nascar ($1.9b)
5 FIFA World Cup ($1.7n)
6 Indian Premier League ($1.6b)
7 Ferrari F1 team ($1.55b)
8 Manchester United Football Club ($1.495b)
9 Formula one ($1.45b)
10 Dallas Cowboys ($1.278b)
[via]
And finally, we’ve been mentioned in the EPLTalk website as among the 10 English football bloggers you must follow on Twitter. For those who aren’t aware or are cynical about twitter, think of it as a microblogging service that you can use for a myriad of things. Some use it for PR, companies use it for customer service, some use it to follow breaking news. Quite recently it has received enormous praise when the Iranian government banned complete coverage from foreign media. So Iranian citizens used twitter to send updates to the outside world, breaking barriers etc.
Anyway, we are happy to see ourselves on the list, and since we usually don’t win awards, we’ll lap up any credit that comes our way. Those interested can follow us on twitter, here. If I’m not on the blog, you will see me put up some small questions/thoughts on United and football in general over there for you to reply to/discuss. Plus, I may put up some interesting links to articles I encounter during the day since it’s far easier to do it there than on the main blog. So do follow us there, if you please. Oh, and do follow those 10 other folks mentioned in the post referenced above.
Enough about us, over to you…
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