The 14 players Arsenal are being seriously tipped to sign, this window.

By Sir Hardly Anyone

In one interesting little development, FoLo have started listing players that they have no information on, as with, “I genuinely don’t know of any current interest from Arsenal in Tah, though I also wouldn’t dispute whether or not there is any.”     At least it is a sudden outbreak of honesty.

But we are not cheating as we once again launch the Transfer Window Chart, listing every player we can find that Arsenal are being seriously linked with.

And we do this in a fantasy world in which we have no idea for how long football will be suspended in England, but most people suspect that the current season will not be resumed.

But this is for sure: as a result, of the current lockdown clubs are going to be in very serious financial trouble, as we pointed out in our last article, and that is simply not going to leave money floating around to buy new players.

Yes of course the Kroenke’s could plough money into Arsenal, although that’s not what they normally do with their sports franchises (they normally use them to make money, not soak it up) – and of course, we should remember that there are problems with all their sports operations due to the virus, not just with Arsenal.

But never let reality get in the way of a good fantasy, as those journalist chappies say, so the wagon is rolled out of its hiding place, and off we go with another transfer window, played out as if nothing untoward is happening at all.

Not one of the articles that I have studied (well, glanced at, for they are mostly so trite that a glance is all that is needed) to pick up these well-researched and authenticated journalistic bits of gibberish, mentions that the clubs are going to be in financial difficulty and the summer transfer window might simply not happen.

The game is: Pretend everything is ok, and maybe it will be.  But if you want a dose of reality you could try Football is about to collapse totally. So what happens after that?

Here is the opening chart.  Remember our target is 130 transfer rumours by the close of the window.  The normal number of rumours that turn out to be true is 3%.  This time it could be as low as 0%.