Worst transfer rumor of the day: Inter Milan to poach Conte from Chelsea

It’s tough to get the masses excited by transfer rumors in the doldrums of February, but Inter’s new owners, Chinese retail giant Suning appear to have launched an impressive spread on the front pages of Tuttosport in Italy today, plastering in bold letters a €60m offer to Antonio Conte and an equally impressive war chest of €400m to along with it.

To be clear, this is Juventus’ arch-rivals Inter offering a Juventus legend €15m per year, despite their current new coach, Frank de Boer’s replacement Stefano Pioli riding a seven-match Serie A winning streak ahead of today’s big derby day showdown against, you guessed it, Juventus in Turin.

If none of this makes any sense to you, you’re not alone.

That said, the supposed Inter offer is roughly twice Conte’s current salary at Chelsea (£6-6.5m), so there’s room to negotiate when the question of his contract extension does come up. Conte signed a three-year deal with Chelsea in the summer and I could see his agent starting to put pressures like these out there to get an extension worked out should we win the title this season. Not saying that this is his agent’s doing, it likely isn’t, but it could happen one day in the future.

Chelsea are obviously a bit reticent to give long-term managerial contracts given our habit of sackings and pay-offs (though we escaped with having to “only” pay £8m to Mourinho and staff last year) but riding high on the emotion of Conte’s revolution, we could do worse than to give him a raise and a few extra guaranteed years.