If you’re a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan who likes to follow the transfer rumour mill, especially through social media, then you might have stumbled across a rather ‘out there’ story on Tuesday involving the Championship club and André Silva.
Claims of Wolves making an offer of around £35m for the AC Milan striker circulated on Twitter, which we found hard to believe, and in order to help explain exactly what’s happened for the story to get to this point, we’re going to walk you through our research in the order we found it.
It all started with a tweet from Betway’s Twitter account claiming ‘Reports in Italy say Wolves have had a £34.7m bid for Andre Silva rejected’.
Far from being very helpful with the source, we decided to have a little dig via a simple Twitter search, which helped us find this tweet from an anonymous account directly tweeting Wolverhampton Wanderers about the ‘story’.
As you can see, there’s a mention of £42m. We’ll come back to that later..
We were also helpfully pointed in the direction of Corriere della Sera, so, as we always do, we double checked in Tuesday’s edition to see if we’d missed anything earlier in the day during our Italian newspaper reading session, but there wasn’t anything in the actual newspaper.
A quick Google search brought up this article from Milan Live, an AC Milan fan site, who, in their daily transfer round-up, mention the Corriere della Sera article, as well as a report from Sky Sport Italia that a Chinese club had an offer of €35m turned down for the Portuguese striker.
Eventually, we found this article on Corriere della Sera’s website, which does indeed mention a Wolves bid for André Silva having been rejected, but without a fee.
We now have the source of the ‘reports in Italy’, but we’re still missing that random £42m.
A quick Twitter search led us to this account, relaying a claim from @Oracolo_RN, whose bio reads “Guardian of a faith and attentive observer, I collect rumours for Rossoneri brothers”.
A quick scroll through the profile then led us to this exchange, where they state ‘a substantial offer from Wolves arrived, but Milan didn’t want to let him go’.
When someone then asked them ‘how substantial’ the offer actually was, the reply was, well, here it is: “By hearsay, I haven’t seen the offer with my own eyes, so I can’t give you the truth when it comes to the numbers, but it was apparently around £42m”.
WE HAVE OUR £42M CLAIM, FINALLY.
That, and a headache.
FFS Twitter.
We’re all for Wolves spending big and buying players like Ruben Neves that no one expected to move there, but £42m for André Silva, a striker who only moved to Milan six months ago?
Nah, sorry.
There has been a claim from Corriere dell Sera but it looks like part of a rumour round-up, and may have found it’s way from Twitter. Since then things have been twisted greatly from RTs and the whole thing has turned into something of a mess.
