Silly season

Benzema, Villa, Costa, Ribery, Silva, Young, Valencia, Aguero, Eto'o, Nilmar... the list of players supposedly on United's transfer radar lengthens by the day.



The media's scattergun approach to transfer speculation means that every glance at the morning tabloids yields a new exclusive, while the internet spawns and perpetuates fresh myths by the hour.



The sale of Cristiano Ronaldo, topping up Sir Alex Ferguson's transfer fund with an extra £80million, was the fabulists' dream situation - an entire summer with the licence to fill slow news days.



It makes for exciting reading, as a glance at our own What The Papers Say section can attest. Unfortunately, the upshot is that it all needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. There will be truth in some of the whispers, as the club's extensive scouting network always has recommendations and rarely does a transfer materialise without the media catching wind of it.



But the vast majority will be nothing more than bunkum. Will Villa swap Spain for England, just days after admitting that he would definitely be in his homeland next season? Would United move for the 27-year-old in the first place, or even Ribery (26) or Eto'o (28) for that matter?



And how about the fees involved? £50million for Aguero? It's near-impossible to imagine the club parting with a fee of that magnitude. Yes, records have tumbled before for the likes of Ferdinand, Berbatov and Veron, but Sir Alex and David Gill both have a stringent sense of value.



Just because Real Madrid can throw exorbitant amounts of money around, hoovering up players from all over the world, doesn't mean we will.Ronaldo, Rooney, Anderson, Nani, the Da Silvas, Macheda, Park, Tosic, Vidic, Evra, Carrick. A quick glance over the club's transfer activity in recent years shows mainly players bought in their teens or on the right side of their mid-twenties for reasonable fees and subsequently developed.



When the signings come, the chances are that they will be in that same mould, rather than established superstars with inflated price tags. Anything that suggests otherwise, while entertaining, will be little more than fantasy.