How Did This Transfer Rumor Start? Carvalho to Arsenal

In a quest to discover the original source of a transfer rumor involving Arsenal and Portugese midfielder William Carvalho, I learned far more about how transfer rumors are made than I ever expected. Get ready to go on a wild journey, people.

ARSENAL TRANSFER NEWS: GUNNERS BEAT MAN UTD TO £19.8M CARVALHO, reads a July 2 headline from the Daily Star. The only sourcing in this article is the hyperlinked phrase "according to reports," directing us to a July 1 article on Metro. The headline there reads:

ARSENAL 'SCOUTING WILLIAM CARVALHO AHEAD OF TRANSFER'. The actual article (all 91 words of it) merely states Arsenal sent scouts to the U-21 tournament to watch Carvalho. In addition, it explicitly states "Liverpool, Tottenham and Manchester United were also scouting Carvalho, and are all serious contenders in the race to bring the £19.8 million-rated youngster to the Premier League." So it seems the Daily Star decided, "eh, what the hey, let's just say Arsenal won the bid." The only sourcing on this article is, again, a hyperlink in the phrase "according to reports." This takes us to a Liverpool Echo report published the same day with the headline:

LIVERPOOL FC TRANSFER RUMOURS: SCOUTS WATCH CARVALHO. Let's pause to take stock for a moment: with two measly clicks, we have gone from "Gunners beat Man United to Carvalho" to "Liverpool Transfer Rumours: Scouts Watch Carvalho." This article has no hyperlink, but vaguely cites O Jogo, a Portugese paper. After a Google Translate-assisted search of O Jogo, we find this, also from July 1:

WILLIAM IS A PRIORITY FOR ARSENE WENGER. I don't want to quote this article too heavily since it's Google Translated, but it very clearly cites "the newspaper 'Daily Telegraph' and 'London Evening Standard'" as sources for Wenger's interest. There is no mention of Liverpool, Manchester United, or Tottenham.

I scrolled through a month's worth of Arsenal transfer rumors at The Telegraph (personal favorite: "Why Arsenal Need Zlatan") and found nothing prior to July 1 about Carvalho. So this is the end of the line.

Or is it? The day after O Jogo cited The Telegraph, The Telegraph itself cited the Daily Star's report, which you might recall from the beginning of this article, that GUNNERS BEAT UNITED TO £19.8M CARVALHO.

It's all come full circle: the original "source"—which was never an actual source to begin with—is now citing the fifth degree of separation as its own source. We're through the looking glass here, people: the transfer rumor mill is a perpetual motion machine. It can survive on its own energy, feeding off itself. It is alive.