Football transfer rumours: Lionel Messi to join Manchester City from Barça?

However, today's main hogwash is bigger than all that. Bigger than all that multiplied by a million plus infinity. Take a deep breath folks and get ready to act in an appropriate over-the-top and location-suitable manner. (If you are on a train, faint; if you are eating breakfast, spit out your Coco Pops; if you are at a wedding, shout out, 'are you are having a laughing mate?' when the groom says 'I give you this ring as a visible and constant symbol of my promise to be with you, for as long as I live'.) So what's this whopper, you ask? Well, erm, how should the Mill put this? It seems that, erm, Lionel Messi is off to, eh ... Manchester ... City! City's squillionaire benefactor, Sheikh Mansour, has been "keeping tabs" on Messi ever since he took charge of the club in 2008 and, after almost six years of hard thinking, he has decided that the Argentinian striker is indeed good enough to play alongside the likes of James Milner, Micah Richards and Martín Demichelis. With that decision made, Sheikh Mansour presumably took the £146m he had in his wallet, spread it out on a bed and sent Barcelona a selfie with the message that it could all be theirs in return for their prized possession. Given that Messi has only scored 36 goals in 37 games this season, that he is only the greatest player ever to play the game and that the money would allow Barcelona to buy a decent defence, the club are considering a positive response to Mansour's offer. Sure they have marketing-campaign's Neymar up front anyway and he is just as good as Messi, right? While Messi moving to Manchester seems about as likely as Liverpool winning the title this season, one player who is most definitely on his way to the other side of Cottonopolis is Bayern Munich's Thomas Müller. Nothing in life is simple, not least multimillion pound deals for big lumps of over-senstitive, over-paid, under-performing pieces of meat, and this deals comes with a catch for the German international. If he wants to be playing in the red of Manchester United next season, then he has been told by the Bayern head honcho, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge - who looks more like he runs a successful chain of small bakeries with his wife throughout the small villages between Hamburg and the Danish border rather, than a football club - that he is going to have to scribble a transfer request on a piece of paper and hand it to the relevant authorities at Bayern. "If a player does not feel comfortable with Bayern Munich, he must come to my office. Then you have to talk about it," barked Rummenigge, Kazinform cites the Guardian. However, even with this talking done, Müller is still going to cost United a cool £37m but sure, won't it be money well spent because all of the club's problems are up front, right? Müller, the Mill should mention, won't be the only German licking the lid of life in west Manchester. He will be joined by Toni Kroos, Mats Hummels, Marco Reus, Johann Sebastian Bach,Otto von Bismarck and Carl Friedrich Gauss. Back to Liverpool for a moment. Brendan Rodgers could have spent the night staring into space, a single tear rolling down his left cheek and wondering how his life would be different if Dwight Gayle had never been born, but instead he has spent the night wondering how he can make sure his side no longer throw away three-goal leads against sides who have the joint-second-worst scoring record in the Premier League. The answer is, of course, to ship out the likes of Martin Skrtel and buy a job-lot of decent defenders. First on Brendan's shopping list is Sporting Lisbon's Marcos Rojo. Now the Mill follows the Portuguese league with about as much interest as it does the political wranglings of northern Bolivia, but by all accounts this young fella, who can play left-back and/or centre-back and who has a £25m buy-out clause, is dead good. So too are Southampton's Luke Shaw and Cardiff's Steven Caulker and they are in positions second and third, respectively, on that same list of Brendan's. Over in Swansea, it won't be long now before the fans burst out in great big balls of blubbery tears, like grown adults at a NKOTBSB concert, when they hear the news that they are going to have to say goodbye to their saviour this season, Wilfried Bony, who is doing one to Borussia Dortmund. It is a move that will come as a surprise to no one except those of us who think that playing in the Champions League for one of the best clubs in Europe is less appealing than fighting for survival in the Premier League. Speaking of shock moves. Kim Kallstrom's time in England has been such a roaring success that Arsenal fans will be left scratching their heads when they find out that Arsène Wenger will, instead of offering the Swede a new contract, be offering him a one-way ticket back to Spartak Moscow. Hands up who saw that coming?