The Warm-Up: Kylian Mbappe and the Alan Partridge fever dream

The new season is nearly upon us now. The Warm-Up knows that not because we have access to anything resembling a calendar but because things are starting to take a surreal turn in the transfer window.

There have been a few perverse currents pulling this way and that all summer: the strange announcement videos, the Jorge-Mendes-Does-Wolverhampton affair, and so on. But it now feels as if the real heritage transfers of the window – the true sagas, if you will – are trying to get in on the act.

Fittingly for a man so speedy, Kylian Mbappe was first to the party on Wednesday. Actually, he didn’t really do anything, but a whole bunch of photos of him as a kid began to do the rounds. Yep, that’s wee K-dog (maybe… 18 months ago?) grinning away inside his self-erected shrine to Cristiano Ronaldo.

It is, of course, completely normal for a young football fan to have heroes. But The Warm-Up embarked on a CSI-style forensic-analysis montage of the pictures and could not identify a single one that wasn’t of his muscle-bound future team-mate. It’s all a bit Alan-Partidge-fever-dream, and Ronaldo would be well advised to think long and hard about ever taking up an invite for a Lucozade chez Kylian.

Next up was Naby Keita. Or rather, RB Leipzig sporting director Ralf Rangnick, who clearly just wants his young charge to get his mind off Liverpool and back to the important matter of injuring team-mates in training.

“There should be someone who points them into the right direction,” he said. “The boys themselves are not the problem here. It is their surroundings. A whole village in Guinea or somebody from their entourage tells the players why they must do something right away.”

A good line for our friends at the tabloids, no doubt, but certainly not to everyone’s taste, as one former Premier League star proved:

After all that, Neymar’s contribution to Saga Day was a little less explosive, but no less likely to clog up your Twitter feed for a good few hours yet.

The Brazilian opted for a play out of the “Oooooh, where could I pooooossibly end uuuuup”” playbook previously favoured by Eden Hazard, deploying three question-mark emojis to do his dirty work:

Predictably, he then scored the winner in Barcelona’s friendly with Manchester United, capitalising on an error by Antonio Valencia to swivel in the area and finish.

You’ve got to hand it to the kid: he knows how to stay in the conversation.

Nicklas Bendtner, Emmanuel Adebayor, Mario Balotelli, Gael Clichy and Emre Belozoglu. Nope, not some ‘guess the team-mate in common’ quiz question (maybe that too – do write in!) but a list of players who were in action in the Champions League on Wednesday night. In 2017! Scenes.

Balotelli had the best night of that bunch, scoring for Nice in their 1-1 draw with Ajax. But there was precious little to get excited about in Glasgow, where Celtic played out a goalless draw with Bendtner’s Rosenborg side.

The real loser at Celtic Park was the English language. “They’ll be happy with 0-0,” said Brendan Rodgers. “But we’re equally as happy because we know that we can go there and score goals.”

Equally as happy. Shudder.

If he does hot-foot it to Paris Saint-Germain, Neymar would not be the first twinkled-toed Brazilian striker to walk out on Barcelona with his best years still ahead of him. Ronaldo performed a similar act 20 years ago this summer, leaving for Inter under a cloud after a fractious few months behind the scenes.

O Fenômeno only had one season at the Camp Nou, but crikey, what a season it was. The best clip of it is in Spanish, but the sheer number of highlights – assists, dribbles and passes as well as goals – more than makes up for it.

Yes, you can smell the desperation to remain newsworthy from here. Yes, he is wearing an unforgivable vest. Yes, his photo-cropping skills could do with some work.

But come on. It’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic, posing with a giant banknote emblazoned with Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s face. Sometimes you just have to smile and nod.

The Warm-Up is sympathetic to the view that loyalty has gone missing in the modern game. One minute you’re building a future for your family by writing snarky news round-ups on the internet, the next you’re begging the local cafe for shifts. We get it.

But Stoke chairman Peter Coates might want to calm down a bit over the sale of Marko Arnautovic to Stoke. “We are disappointed in him personally,” the former said yesterday. “We resurrected his career. Our managers and coaches worked very hard to improve him and made him a name in the game.”

Damn. Guess he left on the cheap? No, £25 million.

Oh. That’s a lot. He was expensive in the first place? No, £2.6m.

Riiiiight. So just the 862% mark-up then. Still, he must be a traitor if he’s left after just… how long?

Four complete seasons. Hmmm.

Moral of the story: if your transfer-market model is signing players who are desperate to get their careers back on track, don’t get annoyed when you make huge financial gains from them doing so.

That’s Barney Ronay on his favourite Premier League goal. It’s very good, as you would expect.

After a month of mesmerisingly consonant-heavy fixture lists, the Europa League finally reaches the ‘teams you’ve actually heard of’ stage this evening, with 29 matches across (wait, really?) nine kick-off times.

Much of the focus on these shores will be on Everton, who play noted earth Pokemon Ruzomberok at 8:05pm. Among the other big names in action are AC Milan, Marseille and PSV Eindhoven.