Arsenal to bid for Wayne Rooney? We're skeptical.

According to the Manchester Evening News, Arsenal are set to bid for Manchester United's wantaway striker Wayne Rooney. Rooney, who requested a transfer for the second time shortly before Sir Alex Ferguson's retirement, has been on-again, off-again linked with Arsenal over the summer, usually through the medium of Twitter, the Daily Mail, Daily Star and the Metro. This is the first report that is in a paper with some spectrum of reliability; as a local Manchester paper, the Manchester Evening News has solid information with regards to Manchester United.

Yet, it is still very hard to see Arsenal landing the England striker. Arsene Wenger may be an admirer of Rooney's talents, and wanted to sign Rooney ten years ago, but the 27 soon to be 28-year old would still be quite a financial commitment, with a transfer fee of over 25 million pounds and current wages at 250,000 pounds per week. Arsenal may have more money to spend and could be looking to change the wage structure, but signing Rooney would be taking the wage structure and totally smashing it.

Finally, the last report in a national newspaper of some repute, the Guardian, reported that Rooney would decide to stay and would seek talks about a new contract with David Moyes. According to the M.E.N, those talks haven't yet occurred, but even so, Rooney wants to leave. While not wanting to discredit either the M.E.N. or the Guardian, both reports seem a lot like agent talk, and Rooney's agent, Paul Stretford, is notoriously leaky. The use of Arsenal, here, seems to be as a convenient club of interest which would make enough sense without doing extreme damage to Manchester United, unlike, say, Manchester City. Thus, it would be best to remain very skeptical about reports of Wayne Rooney joining Arsenal.