Cloak-and-dagger transfer deals have always held a certain fascination.
They are harder to pull off in the modern era of football where it seems whole swathes of the industry and media - social or otherwise - are solely dedicated to the science of player trading although not impossible as Liverpool showed two summers ago when, only hours after finally completing the long drawn-out acquisition of Spanish midfielder Thiago Alcantara from Bayern Munich which had garnered innumerable column inches in the preceding months, a swoop for Wolves’ Portuguese forward Diogo Jota was suddenly out of the blue revealed to be close to completion and sealed very soon afterwards.
But even back in the days before the Premier League, 24-hour rolling sports news channels and self-styled transfer experts, rumour and gossip was part of the landscape meaning clubs would occasionally go to great lengths to keep whispers of a potential move quiet until completion when they could announce it as a done deal to the shock of fans and media alike.
