Transfer deadline day may have been and gone, but the rumours never stop.
The latest outlandish suggestion involves Barcelona, Pedro and a Leicester City midfielder that just about every Fantasy Football player will have in their team.
That’s right, Riyad ‘goal machine’ Mahrez.
The 24-year-old Algerian international is, according to the Daily Mail, being lined up as a replacement for Pedro following the Spaniard’s £22m move to Chelsea.
Barca are banned from registering players until 2016, but that has not stopped them from bringing in a couple of players, such as Arda Turan from Atletico Madrid.
The Catalans are in no rush, then, to tie up a deal for Mahrez but will monitor his form closely and if it keeps up, he could be swapping the King Power Stadium for the Nou Camp in 2016.
It’s out there, but it’s not the first time a European giant has made an unlikely signing from the Premier League.
Thomas Gravesen
Back in the glory days under a young and enthusiastic David Moyes (hear us out), a dynamic Everton side troubled the top four on more than one occasion.
Central to their form was the midfield axis of Thomas Gravesen and Lee Carsley, and the Dane’s displays were enough to catch the eye of Real Madrid manager Vanderlei Luxemburgo.
A year later he’d left the Spanish capital for Celtic and people pretended it had never happened. Nothing gets past us at JOE.co.uk, though.
Julien Faubert
Remarkably, Gravesen isn’t even the most “what-the-f**k” signing the Spaniards have made in the last decade or so.
Juande Ramos, whose appointment at the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu was a head-scratcher in and of itself, was so enamoured by a player he spotted during his time at Spurs that he made a beeline for the player’s signing.
The man in question? West Ham right-back Julien Faubert. Alfredo Di Stefano’s face at his unveiling says it all.
Di Stéfano thinking: "Who the f*** have we signed?" #WTFtransfers #faubert #RealMadrid #WestHam pic.twitter.com/90XEGUpkz0
— 🏎⚽️😎 (@Daddy05Cool) August 16, 2015
Adel Taarabt
In his time at QPR, Taarabt redefined the term “enigma”.
After dragging the club to the Premier League under Neil Warnock, the manager’s departure saw the playmaker whelm, underwhelm and more or less evaporate into thin air, in that order.
A loan spell at Fulham led to not much of anything, so the second half of the 2013/14 season saw him lent out again, to…wait, AC Milan? Yup, it’s all true.
