One of the worst things about languishing in the purgatory of endlessly waiting for playoff games the Vancouver Whitecaps aren’t even involved in is the almost complete lack of any concrete news around the club.
And yet even in this barren wasteland of information there have been at least two possible transfer rumours alluding to a player heading to Vancouver (well maybe one and a half, or maybe just one, perhaps half a rumour at best).
Thankfully we are now living in a post-truth world so we can all pretty much speculate to our hearts content.
The most concrete (ish) rumour surrounds Robbie Keane
There are a few good reasons why Keane could come to the Whitecaps.
He and Carl Robinson became firm friends at Wolverhampton Wanderers when a freak training ground accident forced them to undergo a rarely attempted surgical procedure
And both players were said to be hugely relieved when the term “ballectomy” was fully explained to them.
Keane is a proven goalscorer in MLS and is the kind of experienced striker that Robinson has favoured in recent seasons.
Yet against all that stands the Irishman’s much professed hatred of turf and the fact that his salary would surely make him a no go if he was going to be used in the same manner as Earnshaw and Perez.
Robinson has a strange compulsion to sign players based on their impact on the locker room as much as the pitch but Keane would surely be a step too far in that direction.
So Keane to the Whitecaps? It’s less than likely.
The other rumour that swirled around social media recently was caused by this tweet
The LA Galaxy’s Emmanuel Boateng fits the Whitecaps model almost as much as Robbie Keane does.
He’s a quick wide player who doesn’t finish quite as well as he should but the Whitecaps have enough of those to be going on with unless there’s a trade involved somewhere.
The tweet was almost certainly a post-Trump joke rather than a declaration of intent but let’s run this idea passed the space-time continuum and see who tries to kill Hitler.
In 2017 Kekuta Manneh should be eligible for the US National Team and let’s assume he gets selected by whoever happens to be in charge at the time and then let’s further assume he has one of those games where he ends a couple of those runs of his with a goal.
Suddenly there’s a new young superstar on the US team and if there’s one thing the MLS media love it’s an exciting young American player and if there’s one thing that marketing departments of teams love it’s a player who gets media coverage.
To cut a long story short there’s a possibility that Manneh could be the Whitecaps hottest property by some distance next season.
Would MLS love to have such a player on an American team? Sure. Would they be prepared to give the Whitecaps something substantial in return? Sure.
Obviously I’m using “substantial” in the MLS sense of “completely imaginary money” but it’s real if you think it’s real.
So Boateng to the Whitecaps? No, unless somewhere down the line the planets align to make the Galaxy yearn for the marketing muscle of Manneh.
Stranger things are happening every day.
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