David Luiz to Paris Saint-Germain talk starts to get serious

On Thursday, the Mail reported that Paris Saint-Germain were lodging a £50 million for David Luiz, a number so obviously high that it was easy to dismiss the rumour outright. But now we're getting into figures that don't result in reflexive giggling -- the Telegraph are claiming that the clubs are set to agree on a fee closer to £40 million.

That's still an absurdly high figure, of course, but it's close enough to believable that we should be taking it seriously, especially in a transfer window where the Brazilian's been linked to Bayern Munich and Barcelona, two clubs whose interest in players will always cause a spike in price. If David Luiz had been playing more frequently this season, one could certainly see Chelsea resisting, whatever PSG threw at them, but as we saw with Juan Mata the club is more than happy to sell if another teams's valuation of one greatly exceeds our own.

There are still big questions about a David Luiz sale, especially to PSG. FFP regulations are going to severely curtail the Parisian's spending this summer, and dropping a huge chunk of cash on a centre back from a big team would be an absurd way of doing business, at least in my eyes. And then there's the question of how Chelsea might replace him -- the midfield already needed strengthening, and if we lost David Luiz we'd have to spend big just to fill in the gap.

In other words, don't see this as a done deal just yet, regardless of language. The Telegraph report that a deal will be done this weekend... but we'll have to wait and see.

Update: Now the Telegraph have changed their figure to £50 million, which, as mentioned earlier, is so much money that I simply can't believe it's true. But if PSG want to do it, ok?