Laurent Blanc is a happy man. Happiness can come from all sorts of sources – be it seeing someone else unhappy or seeing someone walking into a glass door face first when singing Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees – but Blanc’s happiness comes from his shiny new Crosley Cruiser Record Player sitting in the corner of his office. Even the fact that he wanted it in pink, but the girl in the store with the nose ring and the words ‘You aren’t a waste of space’ tattooed on to her right wrist said they only had dark turquoise left, cannot sour his mood. On the floor, next to the turntable, there is rack that people generally use to put lifestyle magazines that they once bought to impress the person behind the counter but have not looked at since and will never throw away just in case someone should come over and be impressed by their reading material.
But this time it is not filled with back issues of Kinfolk or radical philosophy or Tiny Pencil but with old albums whose covers look like they have been Instagrammed to within an inch of their lives. He is most proud of the original Music from the Original Motion Picture Coffy that he got a long time ago in Music City Records, a small shop near the corner of Florence and Broadway in Los Angeles. He only bought it as he was tickled by the tagline – “They call her ‘Coffy’ and she’ll cream you!” – but that record was the beginning of his love affair with jazz. But he’s very specific about his love. He does approve of that beige jazz you suffer in elevators and he has problems with Whiplash (though not as many problems as he had with Her) – in fact, with increasingly few exceptions, he will listen to listen to nothing released after the late 1960s. Anyway, there is another reason Blanc’s is happy and it has nothing to do with his dark turquoise friend. He has just put down the phone from a conversation with the suits at Real Madrid. “Give us £728m and Cristiano Ronaldo will be posing in a PSG shirt sooner than you can say the smell of green apple and refreshing cucumber, combined with peony and violet and a hint of cedarwood offers all the excitement of new beginnings …” they said. Only the reception in Blanc’s office is as bad as his Spanish he didn’t quite hear it right. “£72m? Sure, we’d be making money,” he thought to himself.
Meanwhile, in a move that will come as a shock to just about nobody in this world, with the notable exception of Ed Woodward, it seems that Neymar will not be moving to Manchester United and will in fact be staying with Barcelona. You see, Mister Ed flew to Barcelona on a promise. What sort of promise? One involving a wink and a nudge and a I’m-game-if-you-are sort of promise. It wasn’t from the player himself – these things never are – but it was from someone who had crawled all the way across the world just to touch the hem of Neymar’s garment and who told Ed that he now had access to the star before adding that said star, despite his relationship with Jesus, would like to shine for the Red Devils. Thing is, once Ed arrived in the Catalan capital, neither the hem toucher or the Brazilian were anywhere to be seen and Ed felt rather foolish standing in the airport all alone with the box of chocolates and the bunch of flowers, not least because the flowers had brewers droop. He gave the number he had been given a call but all he got was the machine who answered back with the sound of that video of the donkey laughing. Anyway, it seems that it had all been a ploy to earn Neymar more money at his current club. Who would of thought that?
Finally, free agent Shola Ameobi is going to sign a deal with Huddersfield, Dwight Tiendalli is being eyed up and down by Leicester and a job lot of Championship clubs are pawing at Manchester United’s young cat, James Wilson. Yeah, you’re right. The Mill has officially bottomed out.Elsewhere, Yoann Gourcuff is sitting outside his new favourite coffee and bread shop, with the song from the Lion King dancing around his head. Dressed with blue jeans, white trainers and a green jumper he bought from a pleasant Danish man with greasy, unpleasant hair and who had the most fabulous north American accent this side of South Dakota, he has turned his face to the September sun. Beside him, there is a man dressed in a short-sleeved Gucci floral shirt with just one too many buttons undone and a woman wrapped in dark circular sunglasses and a Norwegian yellow jumper. They are talking about food – “… lately, though, I’ve been, I’ve been buying the generic brand of waxed beans. I rip off the label. I can hardly tell the difference …” – but Gourcuff is finding it hard to concentrate on their conversation. His heart is thumping like a hard house beat that has taken five too many of those dusky little thingymebobs from the guy in the shades and flag wrapped around his face. Before he left the house, he got some news. Some good news. Some very good news. Everton and Watford have come calling for his signature. The girl in Norwegian yellow leaves and another in Swedish blue arrives. She is wearing the exact same sunglasses and the conversation about food continues apace. “… So when I saw George on the street with an 18 pound turkey and a giant box of wine, I thought: ‘what a coincidence. We’re just about to eat.’”
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