Chelsea and Manchester United to sail past the £550m summer spending mark using random maths

How much? We’re pretending that Chelsea are about to spend over £340m because it’s a really, really big number and big numbers are great.

Travel agent
‘FRENKIE DE JONG is travelling to London ahead of a potential move to Chelsea,’ begins the story on The Sun website from ‘Tony Robertson’, who may or may not exist. Nobody called Tony works for a website, do they? Everybody is called Jack or Jason or Joe.

Now if we assume that Tony does indeed exist, we absolutely know that Tony absolutely knows that De Jong is not joining Chelsea. We know this because he admits as much further down the piece, but crucially not in a headline that reads ‘Man Utd and Chelsea transfer target Frenkie de Jong spotted at airport ‘flying to London’ amid Barcelona exit talk’.

But first we have to pretend that ‘now after appearing on the bench for the second time this season De Jong appears to be set to seal a transfer to the Premier League’. Except he doesn’t. And it’s quite crucial that he did not just ‘appear on the bench’ but came off it after about an hour. He’s clearly not going anywhere.

And then we reach the ninth paragraph:

‘However, despite the transfer interest of these clubs De Jong’s movements are reportedly not transfer related.’

You don’t f***ing say.

Don’t know much about mathematics
The consensus seems to be that Manchester United will have done spending once Antony is through the door. And the consensus is that Manchester United’s spending will have crossed the £200m mark when that deal is completed.

But that number is not big enough for the Daily Mirror‘s Jeremy Cross (a Leeds fan), who claims that ‘Antony is expected to complete his £85m move to Manchester United in the next 48 hours to take Erik ten Hag’s summer spending over the £225m mark’ (since when is that a ‘mark’?)

Cross does not do the maths and there’s a reason he does not do the maths: The numbers don’t add up.

The Mirror’s own figures – taken from elsewhere – say that Manchester United have signed Casemiro for an initial £60m, Lisandro Martinez for an initial £46.8m and Tyrell Malacia for £15.7m. That equals £122.5m. Add the £85m for Antony and you get £207.5m. Which is not ‘over the £225m mark’.

It might seem pedantic but this is how nonsense permeates and nonsense sticks.

Marky mark
The back page of the Daily Star also features the hard-working Cross, who embarks on the kind of logic usually only seen from…