Tottenham are reportedly now among a number of clubs interested in signing Marcus Rashford on loan from Manchester United this winter.

Rashford wants out of Old Trafford having announced his desire for a “new challenge” last month, but options are thin on the ground thanks to his £300,000 per week wages and his lack of interest in a move to Saudi Arabia or Turkey.

Talks have reportedly been held with Juventus and Borussia Dortmund, while negotiations with Milan are supposedly more advanced.

A report on Thursday revealed that West Ham have also been asked to be ‘kept informed of Rashford’s situation’ after Graham Potter replaced Julen Lopetegui as manager ‘but know he is more likely to join a top European side’.

A sticking point for Milan could be their unwillingness to stump up more than half of Rashford’s £300,000-a-week wages, and that’s also sure to be a problem for Tottenham and their penny-pinching chairman Daniel Levy.

The Daily Mail claim ‘Spurs are looking to bolster their attacking options and rescue their season despite being the second-top scorers in the Premier League’ and have therefore joined the clubs vying to sign Rashford this month.

The report claims manager Ange Postecoglou is pushing for the club to sign new forwards amid the conceding form of captain Son Heung-min and the injury problems for Richarlison and summer signing Wilson Odobert.

MORE MANCHESTER UNITED COVERAGE ON F365
👉 Big Weekend: Arsenal v Man Utd, Accrington, Kinsky, Guardiola, Bayern Munich
👉 Man Utd ‘consider £40m offer’ for Arsenal target despite Amad contract extension
👉 Liverpool forward ‘considered’ to ‘replace’ hijacked Man Utd transfer target amid Rashford swap ‘talks’

Spurs hero Chris Waddle has warned his former side against a move for Rashford, questioning the “desire” of the England international, who’s been “bang average” for the last season-and-a-half.

Waddle told Prime Casino: “There’s a lot of mind games going on with Marcus Rashford. I think there are a lot of doubts about his desire, his passion and his ambition.

“If he went to Tottenham and the fans were singing his name, would he be happy with that and think, ‘That’s it, I’ve arrived, I don’t need to do that anymore.’

“Whoever gets him, they’re going to get a player for six months. After that, can he keep that appetite and hunger to go on? Can he prove to everybody he should be playing left wing for England? To do that, he needs to be playing week in, week out for his club side.

“What is he doing at the minute? They said he was ill for the Liverpool game, not in the squad. No disrespect, but he’s not young anymore. People keep talking as if he was 21. He’s not.

“He’s had an in and out career. We all know he’s got ability, but we’ve seen this story with so many players before. Players like Dele Alli, Ross Barkley they come on the scene, burn brightly and then disappear. Both of those players were talked as world-beaters when they were younger, and they couldn’t do it over the curse of their careers. There are so many players who were tipped to become the next big thing, and it didn’t happen for them. The only person that can change it is Marcus Rashford.

“I expect him to move on. He needs to move on from Manchester United. Whether it’s a loan until the end of the season, whether it’s permanent, he must think to himself, ‘I’ve got to get away. I’m wasting time, I need to get in the England squad, I need to be playing, and I want to show everybody how good I can be.’ He had that season where he scored loads of goals, but that is becoming a distant memory. He’s been bang average since.”

Manchester United are not the only club regretting a summer signing but theirs is certainly the most expensive of all mistakes to be rectified in January.

Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall (Chelsea)
This was surely not the future sold to Dewsbury-Hall in the summer.

The move made plenty of ostensible sense, immediately reuniting Leicester’s Player of the Season with the manager who made their promotion possible, drafting a future England international into Chelsea’s midfield jumble for £30m, or the approximate value of whichever academy graduate their finger landed on next.

In reality, it looks more like a scratching of Leicester’s PSR back as an apology for snatching their manager away. Dewsbury-Hall described Chelsea as “a club people grow up watching and hoping to one day play for” when he joined and six months into his Stamford Bridge stay, that hope goes on.

All nine of his starts have been in the Europa Conference League or Carabao Cup, with only 18 of his mere 55 Premier League minutes coming since the end of August. Chelsea are already willing to sell; the only surprise is that he hasn’t been abandoned in the reserves just yet.

Joshua Zirkzee (Manchester United)
With Manchester United suddenly open to the idea of parting with three previously unsellable assets in what might well be Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s greatest 4D cost-cutting exercise yet, it seems fair to say that no-one is safe at Old Trafford.

That was uncomfortably accurate for Zirkzee on his last visit, when Manchester United supporters cheered his substitution during what now looks to be a perfectly acceptable defeat to Newcastle just before the turn of the year.

It was a fork in the road for many. The immediate speculation was that Zirkzee was desperate to leave for the contentment of Serie A after struggling to make an impact in England. If his removal after barely half an hour in the Newcastle game was not enough, the wider reaction and subsequent reported ‘tears’ would be impossible to overcome.

Manchester United themselves certainly seem to have admitted their mistake and are scrambling around for a receipt in the blind hope of recouping their money.

But conflicting reports suggest Zirkzee actually wants to stick it out and turn things around in a fight for his place and future. It is hard not to think that scoring – or even just taking on – that chance against Liverpool might have helped.

Jaden Philogene (Aston Villa)
After the mutually beneficial deals painstakingly negotiated through the summer between Aston Villa and Everton, they are back at the table to discuss similar matters in January.

Everton pushed to sign Jaden Philogene in the summer and have not been deterred by a record of no goals or assists but one red card in 535 minutes on the Villa periphery.

Unai Emery’s side triggered their buy-back option on the forward after a fine season with Hull to fend off interest from Everton, who remain enticed by what Philogene can offer to their hilariously non-existent attack.

But the Toffees have already met their loan limit and so the financial viability of a permanent deal is being explored, to which Villa have been entirely receptive.

Apropos of nothing, Villa have sent Lewis Dobbin out on a second loan and Tim Iroegbunam was not playing for Everton before suffering an injury following their entirely legitimate summer moves. Amadou Onana has been decent, mind.

Ben Brereton Diaz (Southampton)
The record-breaking wait goes on for a Premier League win. Even Marvin Sordell and Emmanuel Villa are wincing at a run of 24 games without victory which does not look like ending soon.

His choice of clubs could certainly be questioned, even taking into account any uncontrollable obsession with fighting against relegation in red-and-white stripes. Sheffield United and Southampton have both won a single Premier League game with Brereton Diaz on their books but the Chile international missed out through injury or the ignominy of being an unused substitute against Everton.

Even within that year-long misery there are peaks and troughs. Things seemed bad at Sheffield United last campaign but six goals in 14 appearances for a team which finished bottom was impressive on a personal level – enough for the Blades to come sniffing around again and Brereton Diaz to consider their advances.

“I think Ben was an obvious one, not playing for Southampton and he was here last season,” said Chris Wilder amid reports of a loan return being put in place with a view to a permanent move. This next time next year he’ll be joining the Saints promotion push to escape Sheffield United’s slide back down into the Championship.

Sam Johnstone (Wolves)
For a team famously not blessed with a particularly flexible budget, Wolves were bizarrely eager to send some of their limited funds to Crystal Palace in the summer. It cost £10m to move Johnstone between benches at Selhurst Park and Molineux, where he remains behind the really not great Jose Sa.

Gary O’Neil was pleased with the added competition Johnstone provided in the goalkeeping department but the other read is that the England international conceded 13 goals in his first five games, was dropped due to injury and form, came back in to let in four goals in O’Neil’s final two matches and was immediately relegated to the bench once more as soon as Vitor Pereira was appointed.

The good news is that his reputation remains strong enough for another Premier League move to be possible. The bad news is that it could be to Spurs.

Man Utd ‘seal first Ruben Amorim deal’ would be compelling if it were true, while we’re supposed to believe Marcus Rashford craves some Dele Alli love…

Man Utd transfer medical booked kerching
Not a great deal has happened so far in the January transfer window and Manchester United have sod all money, but obviously that cannot be allowed to temper the excitement/clicks:

Transfer news LIVE: Man Utd to seal first Ruben Amorim deal today as £21m medical booked

That’s the Express LIVE transfer blog there, wanting you all to believe that a) Man Utd are about to make a signing and b) the medical is booked.

There are few more powerful words in the transfer news dictionary than ‘medical booked’ so this is massive.

Obviously we are all old and cynical enough by now to know that the ‘first Ruben Amorim deal’ to be sealed is not a Ruben Amorim deal at all but the culmination of season-long talks with Amad Diallo about a new contract.

As for the £21m medical (private healthcare is really f***ing expensive), it eventually transpires that it’s actually a £20m medical. At Ipswich. for Jaden Philogene.

LIVE!

MORE MANCHESTER UNITED COVERAGE ON F365
👉 Kobbie Mainoo leads the Premier League’s underpaid army
👉 Kobbie Mainoo to Chelsea? Man Utd fans would rather take PSR hit
👉 Manchester United flop among five summer transfers clubs are already desperate to sell

Blankety-blank
‘Ruben Amorim promotes four Man Utd wonderkids to first-team ahead of Arsenal clash’ – Mirror.

Silly boys have missed out the word ‘training’; they even had the hyphen.

Reunion…together again
There’s obvious interest in where Marcus Rashford goes next after Manchester United, with AC Milan the clear favourites followed by Borussia Dortmund.

Or, if you’re the Express:

Man Utd star Marcus Rashford ‘offered reunion with Dele Alli’ at newly-promoted side

So many things irking Mediawatch here, including but not limited to a) the quote marks quoting nobody, b) the idea that he would seek a ‘reunion’ with a player he played three England games alongside, seven or eight years ago and c) that hyphen.

The story – which originates from Gianluca Di Marzio, who has had an awful lot of Como stories of late – is that Como are interested in Rashford. The biggest story would be if Como weren’t interested; they are in a relegation battle and scoring barely a goal a game.

Fabrizio Romano has since dismissed the story as a non-starter from Rashford’s end – it would be the equivalent of him joining Wolves – and yet here we are, somehow pretending that Rashford is somehow massively motivated to train alongside Dele Alli.

Or, as seen on MailOnline:

‘Serie A club ’emerge as SHOCK contender to sign Marcus Rashford thanks to links with ex-Man United star’ – as European clubs weigh up move for wantaway Red Devils forward’

‘Emerge as SHOCK contender to sign Marcus Rashford thanks to links with ex-Man United star’ is one hell of a bombastic way to interpret the idea that Como ‘would also leverage the presence of Raphael Varane (now the club’s ambassador) with whom he played in England’.

Can you become a ‘contender’ just by telling a friendly journalist that you are? It really does seem so. And which football could possibly resist the lure of Raphael Varane AND Dele Alli?

‘I find this particular trend to be sickening’
With the caveat that nobody else clearly gives a flying f*** about the things that bother Mediawatch, we have to return to Wednesday’s theme of the first-person headline masquerading as a quotes piece or interview, leaping on the bandwagon of the Google Discover ‘curiosity gap’ for such headlines as ‘I had a meal in this five-start restaurant and pooed my whole self out of my body’.

On Monday it was this…

‘Man Utd signed Rasmus Hojlund instead of me – now I could finally join them’

As we noted: ‘There is no tricksy attempt to make this technically correct as with so much other Reach headline housery. It’s presented as a straightforward direct first-person quote from Randal Kolo Muani, and it isn’t. Mediawatch doesn’t think it’s being oversensitive in suggesting this isn’t really okay, and nor is freedom to just make up quotes and put them in headlines a road down which anyone should want to tread.’

But clearly the Mirror are getting some joy from this particular tactic, and when the Mirror get joy from any particular tactic, you can expect it to be repeated 427 times.

So here we are again…

‘I rejected Man Utd transfer – I could still end up calling Marcus Rashford my teammate’

Christian Pulisic there, being bizarrely quoted in a headline despite literally never going on record as saying he rejected United. Instead we are treated to 2019 quotes from ‘Robin Walker – who has remained close to Pulisic since he coached him in his youth at Brackley Town’, which is really quite some billing.

Interestingly, the story appeared two hours later on the Manchester Evening News:

‘I turned down Man United transfer – Marcus Rashford could still end up my team-mate’

And for that little headline twiddle, ‘Jake Bayliss Sport Writer – U35s’ (quite possibly the most depressing job title in media history) claims a byline.