Alfredo Morelos and the £8M bid

So it’s started, with eight days to go of the January window, it’s finally started;

The first bids for Colombian striker Alfredo Morelos are being weighed up, and Steven Gerrard has similarly admitted (and denied) he’s for sale.

The 22-year old forward has been subject to intense speculation about his future since essentially the first January after he signed in 2017, and he’s never denied he sees his future elsewhere.

But with Nice set to lose star hitman Mario Balotelli to fellow Ligue 1 giants Marseille or English giants West Ham inside hours, Arsenal legend Patrick Vieira, now manager at the Velodrome, has reportedly packaged together a starting bid for Morelos said to be in the region of £8M.

This will be knocked back out of hand, we would assume, but manager Steven Gerrard has gently accepted Morelos will go if the price is right.

He said:

“At the moment in this window, Alfredo won’t be going anywhere. But every one of our players has got a price, I’m not naive enough to sit here and say they haven’t. But none of my players will be going out the door, certainly in this window, so anyone who is preparing a bid or thinking of a bid will be wasting their time.”

We must admit this is a pretty strange statement – while saying Morelos is not for sale he’s admitting he effectively is. While saying he’s not leaving this window he says only ‘at this moment’. Making any consistent semantic sense of this can be left to smarter writers than yours truly, but the poignant giveaway is that despite the scattered defiant tone, the submissive concession that Morelos has a price like anyone else pretty much suggests that if Vieira, or any other manager, makes a fat bid for the ex-HJK man, Rangers won’t be in a position to reject.

£8M clearly won’t be enough in this market, especially given the eminently wealthy French top flight, and if Vieira is serious about securing Morelos it’ll take around double that for Rangers to be interested we’d imagine.

We’ll see if this is yet more tabloid talk or if there’s a genuine interest coming from the continent.