Raheem Sterling to Manchester City for £50m?

00:17, 21 March 2015

LONDON. KAZINFORM - Manchester City's crack scouting team has scoured the globe in their search for undiscovered talent whose purchase would not have catastrophic consequences for their attempts to avoid the wrath of Uefa's financial fair play investigators, and then decided to just sod it, and buy at any price the bloke who plays really well for the big team down the road. Raheem Sterling is thus their target, with the Sun suggesting that £50m has been put aside for his purchase - before handily concluding their story with a quote that suggests that a) City probably can't buy him anyway, and b) If they did they'd have to spend more than £50m. But hey, who reads the last paragraph? "You are talking about trying to sign players from clubs that won't sell them," Manuel Pellegrini apparently said. "Can you get Sterling? Maybe if you go to Liverpool with £100m."

But even that kind of spending won't be beyond the moneybags Mancunians if, as the Mirror suggest, they make £150m by flogging Vincent Kompany, Aleksandar Kolarov, Samir Nasri, Yaya Touré, Steven Jovetic and Edin Dzeko. And according to the Mirror, Liverpool have already decided who they'd like to replace Sterling, should City turn up with that £100m - and it's childhood Liverpool fan Theo Walcott, who they may be able to snaffle from the Emirates this summer if Arsenal choose to cash in on a player whose contract expires in 2016 and isn't in the team anyway, Kazinform refers to the Guardian. Manchester United are ready to raid Southampton for a promising English full-back for the second successive summer, and having snapped up Luke Shaw last close seasonNathaniel Clyne is now on their radar. Apparently the Champions League aspirants (that's United) have given up on Rafael and, according to the Star, "may test the water with a £20m offer" (there's no need to spend £20m to test the water in Southampton when the briefest glance will tell you it's pretty filthy and totally freezing, though that might not have been exactly what they meant). United, meanwhile, are rumoured to have a £150m transfer war chest and have allocated a hefty chunk of it to buy Valencia's Nicolas Otamendi. Shakhtar Donetsk are ready to sell Douglas Costa, and have slapped a £25m asking price on the midfielder's bonce. That's not enough to put off Chelsea, whose existing Costa is so good they've decided to get some more (this may not be their actual scouting policy). Also heading this way from places that could broadly be classified as "foreign" isAleksandar Mitrovic, Anderlecht's 20-year-old Serbian hotshot, who has been identified by Swansea as Wilfried Bony's long-term replacement. Apparently they tried to sign him in January and will try again in the summer. Not heading this way, though, is Sami Khedira. The German midfielder won't leave Real Madrid for the Premier League because, Schalke chairman Clemens Tonnies reveals to Bild, "he wants to come back to the Bundesliga", a decision that may well upset English suitors includingArsenal but one that "he does not doubt for a second". But possibly Emirates-bound from Germany is Hakan Calhanoglu, Bayer Leverkusen's Turkish international midfielder. The playmaker is valued at £20m, but the Gunners hope to negotiate a hefty discount by sending Lukas Podolski the other way in part exchange. Across north London it looks like Tottenham will only sign players aged 26 or younger this summer, with the inevitable sprinkling of Southampton players on their wanted list alongside Burnley's Danny Ings and the Cologne centre-back Kevin Wimmer. The decision to solve the club's defensive issues the Wimmer way will particularly please fans of 1980s novelty hit giants Tight Fit. Newcastle are planning a summer splurge, with John Carver revealing that it has "come to me from the top" that "the club will invest in the summer" because "it needs it". Meanwhile in the day's big managerial news, Gary and Phil Neville's sister Tracey has been named interim head coach of England's netball team.

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