For the past two days, Sevilla’s Wissam Ben Yedder has been linked with a move to Manchester United.
We checked online and social media to find out the primary source, but were unable to trace it. So, we decided to backtrack as to where the story originated from.
The Manchester Evening News had included it under their ‘latest Man United transfer rumours’ story on March 13th. Here is the link to their story and at the bottom of the story, they cite Mundo Deportivo as the source.
From there, we visited Mundo’s story [link here] and they have clearly mentioned ‘according to Calciomercato’ in the second paragraph of their report.
Football Espana has cited Mundo Deportivo via Calciomercato as the source while carrying the report on their website [link here].
We decided to further take a look at Ben Yedder’s stories on Calciomercato and so far found these.
On March 12th, Calciomercato [link here] covered a report discussing Lazio sporting director Igli Tare following the La Liga attacker for years. This was published on 17:01 and there was no mention of Manchester United.
A day later [link here], they carried another report discussing Ben Yedder and United, this time they mentioned ‘according to the press reports’.
Interestingly, The Sun have also published a report on Ben Yedder to Manchester United under their gossip section, indicating it’s from elsewhere. That hasn’t stopped publications in England and in Italy from citing them as a source for the Frenchman being linked to the 20-time English champions.
For example, Italian outlet Calciomercato.it has cited The Sun as the source in their story that was published earlier today.
Even though there is no clarity about the original source, it has picked up so much pace that Sevilla president Jose Castro had to address about these rumours.
“At Sevilla we always work for the squad and Ben Yedder is not an exception, although as you said he still has more than two contract seasons…” Mundo quoted him as saying.
There’s a possibility we’ve missed something, strike us down if so, but this looks like the workings of a transfer rumour mill which is looking for any fuel right now.
