Over the last few years the club have been quite cloak and dagger about new signings. Most of the time the first we’ve heard about a new player coming in has been when it was officially announced, with very little about it appearing in the press beforehand. So how comes the last few days the papers have been all over Martin Jol coming to SW6?

It could be for a number of reasons. Perhaps somebody has joined the club recently and has started feeding stories to the media, perhaps the directors think that by getting the media under the story they’ll be able to get Jol a bit easier. Or, call my cynical, could Jol himself have had a sneaking call to one of the sports desks?

He only joined Ajax in 2009, he is a Dutchman, brought in a lot of his own staff to the club, playing in the Champions League next season and seemed quite happy there in general. Then this summer he was told the only way he’d get money to spend on the team was if he sold his best players off.

What better way to get a transfer kitty than to use the interest of another club to force your current club into it? Players do it often to get a better contract if there’s another club sniffing around them, so it’s not out of the question for him to try it. And it seems (at least according to the press) that it’s working; now he’s being told he can keep his best players and have some cash to splash too.

I hope it’s not a case of him using us to leverage himself better working conditions, but I guess we’ll only find out in due course.