It's early morning on the continent, and almost PM here on the East Coast in the USA. We've been tracking the rumors regarding Athletic Bilbao's Javi Martinez and his possible move to Bayern Munich. Check out our earlier stories here and here.
Over the past past few hours, a few outlets are reporting that the Javi-to-Bayern deal is done ...
We've got Fichajes on the Spanish language side, saying that Martinez is on the move for 33 million Euro. In German, we've got Bild getting in on the action with a speculation story. We've even got some French-speakers in on the action with Sport.fr saying the deal is done and citing what I believe says "the daily Record."
Now - as we all know, you can't say anything on the internet that's not true:
At the same time, it seems that everyone is working from the same story: the one from TZ yesterday, which cited un-named "sources" in reporting a 33 million Euro agreement had been reached. And the Bild story basically took a quote from KHR that said "maybe we'll proceed along the lines of doing the expected" and made up a Javi story about it. That may be true, but I haven't heard any confirmation from Athletic Bilbao, from FC Bayern, or from Javi himself. Until I hear it from one of them, I'm going to continue to refer to this move as a "rumor" or a "likely deal" rather than a given, and I won't be welcoming Javi on board quite yet.
As always - email us at bayern.offside@yahoo.com if you have any tips or inside information. Also, if you recently signed up for an account and haven't been given full posting permissions yet, email me and I'll put you right through.
Back with more tomorrow. Thanks for reading.