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Hot Football Transfer Gossip: Marseille 'increase Payet bid by £800k', Chelsea 'to sign Hart', Arsenal 'make £25m Rodriguez bid'

payet
payet

Give Olympique de Marseille their dues – their football squad might not be much cop, but they must have the most gangster negotiating team in the whole of Europe. The French club, who currently sit seventh in Ligue 1, are continuing to try to sign the Ballon d’Or-nominated superstar Dimitri Payet for as little money as possible, much to the increasing fury of West Ham.

The Mail reports that Marseille have made a third offer for the playmaker of £22.3m, which is just fractionally more than their previous offer of £21.5m, which was just fractionally more than their initial offer – dismissed completely out of hand by the Hammers because it was so low – of £20m.

Given that Payet has burned his bridges with West Ham’s staff and fans, while insisting he will not move anywhere except Marseille, he still seems likely to join his former club, but at the current rate of bidding the transfer might not happen until roughly 2019.

[TRANSFER WINDOW LIVE: ALL THE INS, OUTS AND RUMOURS AS THEY HAPPEN]

Either that or West Ham, who can gain no benefit by holding on to Payet beyond this transfer window, will succumb to Marseille’s brutal negotiating tactics and sell him next week for about half the £50m they recently valued him at.

The alternative option is for them to refuse all offers below the asking price and let Payet wind down the remaining four and a half years of his contract working behind one of the refreshment stands at London Stadium. We’ve heard worse ideas.

To put Marseille’s Payet valuation into context, if West Ham accepted Marseille’s most recent bid they would still not have enough money to buy Patrick van Aanholt and Jordan Rhodes with the proceeds.

Sunderland left-back Van Aanholt is on the verge of reuniting with his former manager Sam Allardyce at Crystal Palace in a £12m move (Guardian), while Middlesbrough have demanded the same sum for striker Rhodes after rejecting bids from Aston Villa and Sheffield Wednesday (Sun).

Chelsea players have urged manager Antonio Conte to sign Joe Hart as a replacement for Thibaut Courtois if the Belgian leaves in the summer, says the Sun. Which will be great news for the on-loan Manchester City goalkeeper as soon as Conte starts taking transfer advice from Victor Moses or whoever it is in his squad that thinks Hart is so great.

Meanwhile, the Blues will refuse to sell Asmir Begovic to Bournemouth unless they can find a replacement back-up keeper, with Newcastle’s Tim Krul and Milan’s Diego Lopez under consideration (Guardian). Hart probably wouldn’t fancy coming in as a second-choice because he could stay at City and do that.

Elsewhere, Arsenal are battling with Chelsea for Wolfsburg’s £25m-rated Swiss left-back Ricardo Rodriquez (Mirror), Liverpool have opened contract talks with Philippe Coutinho in a bid to fend off interest from Barcelona (Liverpool Echo) and Wayne Rooney has no intention of quitting Manchester United to move to China (Mail). Probably just a Marseille-style negotiating tactic – he’s waiting for the Chinese to offer him £5m a week.

@darlingkevin