“I can guarantee that Viktor Gyokeres will not leave for 60m euros plus 10m euros because I never promised that,” Varandas said.  “To this day Sporting has not had an offer for Gyokeres – neither today nor last season.”

And that is particularly interesting as last summer we reported that Pain in the Arsenal, Football London, Just Arsenal, TBR  FFC FoLo FoLo FFC (again)   Mirror Fo.Lo  Talksport  FFC  FoLo (again),  Mirror again, FoLo (yet again) and  Football Talk each reported that Arsenal had made an offer for Gyokeres.

Of course, in defence the Corporation in running that story, they will protest that they only publish what they are told, but if that is the case maybe every bit of football tittle tattle should be accompanied by lots of “allegedly” notes.  And of course, it comes alongside the fact that we have found that 97% of football transfers mentioned each summer never happen.

But then looking at this year’s transfer rumours we started to note some names that seemed very familiar – and checking back to our final transfer rumour table of last year we found that already, with the window still having something like seven weeks to go, no less than ten of the players Arsenal have so far been tipped to be buying this summaer. were also tipped in the same way last summer, and (rather obviously), didn’t arrive.  In fact some of them were tipped by several sources, rather than one rogue outlet, and yet still didn’t come to Arsenal.   (Can’t these players just get their acts together?)

Now of course it could well be that Arsenal tried to get the player last summer, failed and are back for another shot – and we will be able to see if that makes any sense by the end of this window.  But for now, there must be a certain suspicion that when news is short, a player from last summer’s transfer rumour list has his details dusted down and he’s put in the “Arsenal make a bid for” list again.  Just to make up the numbers.

In case you are interested details of the players mentioned last summer and whose names are turning up again this year, that list is given at the end.  But it does seem to me rather unlikely that Arsenal will be working on transferring the same player two summers running.  Possible I suppose, but maybe less likely than 20% of them repeating from one year to the next.

In fact last season’s names being repeated this season include just one player that Arsenal have actually signed.  On the other hand around half of the players did indeed move on, so the chances of them seeming to move on again this time to Arsenal seem rather remote.  Unless we are thinking that some clubs see transfer rumours about Arsenal wanting to buy a player, and so nip in and buy him, ready to sell him on at a profit to Arsenal.   If that is so, perhaps I may offer a word of advice to the clubs: most of these stories are made up by the media that publish them.

No, the suspicion must be that when some websites are running out of names of players that Arsenal are trying to sign, they go back and look at last year’s tittle tattle (which was, you may recall, only 3% accurate anyway), and run the same story again.  And why not?  After all, they got away with it last year.

But it does leave me with the feeling that we are being treated as mugs – and that the amount of real research going into finding players who Arsenal are seriously interested in, is very, very limited.   But still, to be fair, congratulations to TeamTalk,  the Daily Express  Football Talk and TBR for getting Martin Zubamendi right, even if it was one year early.

Here is the list from one year ago of players who are now being mentioned once again as coming to Arsenal.  I’m sure it is not complete, but it gives a flavour of what these journalist chaps are up to – which is digging out last summer’s copy and handing it in to their editors as news.