Agent: Koscielny's not off to Barcelona...OR IS HE

Laurent Koscielny, long-term contract and all, has been the source of some idiotic transfer speculation this summer. Some is borne of rumor, some was borne of an interview that he gave that, frankly, was not properly interpreted after the translated version dropped. But there's no real reason to sell him this summer, so despite the smoke I seriously doubt there's fire.

Koscielny's agent admitted as much. Stephane Courbis nixed reports that Barcelona had contacted Arsenal to lodge a €15 million bid, saying that he and his client hadn't been contacted by any club over a transfer.

And then he remembered that he's an agent, and his job isn't to make transfer rumors go away. He said:

But I know that Laurent is part of a short-list of three or four players for both clubs.

Yeah, Stephane. I'm sure.

I don't doubt that there are plenty of clubs that would like to have Laurent Koscielny. He's probably not lying about that - Kos has been pretty good to great since coming to Arsenal, and he's still relatively young. He's technically good and (mostly) intelligent, so he's the kind of defender who fits into the systems run at teams like Barcelona and Bayern Munich. There's probably interest there.

But there's absolutely no reason for Arsenal to sell, unless they're offered something just clownshoes ridiculous for him. He's on a long-term deal. He's not old. Unless you're dumb and misread that interview from a while back, he hasn't written an open letter demanding to be sold. Like we've said about him in the past as well as Thomas Vermaelen, it will be because Arsene Wenger wants to do it, not because he has to.