No, Chelsea have not agreed anything with Ivan Perišić — reports

Sometimes you read a rumor from some random source and think it can be safely ignored because obviously it’s nonsense, only to come back a few hours later and find that despite that, it’s become a serious topic of conversation. Today, that story is concerning Ivan Perišić, who’s certainly not a new name in the Chelsea rumor mill, but perhaps one that’s well past its sell-by date, so to speak.

In fairness to Perišić, who turned 33 a couple months ago, he’s still doing quite alright for himself, and has in fact set a career high for number of appearances with 47 (and counting) for Inter Milan, who just won the Coppa Italia and could yet defend their Serie A title as well — they are two points behind rivals AC Milan, with two games left to play.

However, the Croatia international’s future beyond those two games is a bit more murkier. He’s out of contract in June, and while he’s in pretty good position to try to negotiate a new contract with the Nerazzurri, evidently that possibility still hangs in the balance. And that’s where Chelsea come in with our supposed interest — nay, supposed agreement to sign him up.

A couple obvious problems with that, most notably the fact that we literally cannot make such agreements due to the sanctions and restrictions placed on the club by the UK government, which have yet to be lifted since Todd Boehly’s acquisition of the club from Roman Abramovich is not yet complete. We cannot even offer new contracts to our own players, let alone to players on other teams!

And then there is the part where we’re quite unlikely to offer multi-year contracts to any player over 30, and while that unwritten club policy may change in the future, it seems be part of our m.o. as of right now still.

Plus, here are Alfredo “Hot Days” Pedullà and Fabrizio “The Oracle” Romano to debunk this nonsense, too. Carry on.