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It's a funny thing about rumours - I'm not inclined to believe many of them, but I'm sure happier to talk about them if they seem to be good news for Chelsea. With that in mind, the Daily Mirror/Sunday People has some things to say about Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Luka Modric via the always reliable 'Tottenham source':
There are difficult decisions for Luka to make. He still enjoys life at Spurs and that’s largely down to Harry, but he was flattered by Chelsea’s interest and deep down his close friends know he would still like to go to Chelsea.
Spurs are apparently trying to offer Modric a new £70,000 a week contract*, but the midfielder doesn't want to sign because a) he'd rather be at Chelsea b) he's worried that Harry Redknapp would leave and c) that much money for a player who's almost certainly one of the three best midfielders in the league is lunacy. Derisory, in fact.
*If true I wonder where all the people who insisted that he makes that much now have gone.
Yeah, Tottenham have a wage structure, and it caps at £70,000. Fine. Great. Stick to your guns. But that implicitly means that unless there are other factors involved, you'll have a difficult time keeping the best of the best under contract when they could easily double their money elsewhere. I'm not going to get into the morality of Chelsea throwing their money around against poorer clubs (actually, I will - it kind of sucks but I can live with the outcomes), but right now we pay more than Spurs, so that's just a fact of life.
Incidentally, Harry Redknapp has gone on record describing Modric as basically a perfect, professional little angel in this saga. That's a little weird considering that he missed three Tottenham matches while trying to engineer a move, but it's amazing that he wasn't more disruptive with this much money at stake. I mean, with a Chelsea move compared to his old contract, we're talking an extra eighty thousand pounds a week. That's sell-your-brother-into-slavery money for me (I hope he doesn't read this) - it's always astonishing to me how people complain about footballers getting their head turned. THAT'S A LOT OF MONEY.
Anyway, I still would like a Modric to add to my collection of cute little hobbit players (we have Juan Mata as Frodo, Ashley Cole as Gollum so we need a gardener), so let's just sign him in January. Money money money Luka. Niiice money. Oh, and Champions League football too.