Dutch website claims £17m deal for Vincent Janssen done, pending Tottenham medical

Could that long-awaited breakthrough in the Vincent Janssen transfer saga finally have arrived? Dutch football blog Voetbalzone claims it has, writing that Tottenham Hotspur and AZ Alkmaar have agreed on a £17m transfer that will bring the Eredivisie’s top scorer to the Premier League.

The article says that the player, who scored two goals yesterday in one half of a AZ preseason match, is set to fly out to London at the earliest possible convenience to undergo a medical with Spurs ahead of the deal being finalized. The amount of the transfer is said to be “€20m plus bonuses.”

Great news, right? Wheeeeeeeeee! But Mama Menno didn’t raise no gullible boys. Who or what is Voetbalzone.nl? And are they reliable?

I have no idea, so I turned to Reddit for guidance. Here’s /r/coys user sam1oq on Voetbalzone:

Dutchy here TIF on voetbalzone.nl: it's the biggest Dutch website on football. They used to just collect rumors and news from all sort of sources and write match reports, but recently they've been interviewing players, bringing out scouting reports of unknown young players that have been in the news recently and as we see here they've also started reporting themselves. This is the first time I see them reporting something so I have no clue how reliable this is. In context of what has been written before this seems reliable, but I can only guess as much as any other person that has been following this saga.

So, promising, but it’s not the BBC, you know? It’s could be telling that the big papers in England haven’t picked it up yet except for the Express, which references a Football Insider article which itself references “a well-placed Tottenham source.” Not exactly Deep Throat, and I’ve been burned before.

Look, I want this to be true as much as anyone, but if my nearly two years in charge of this site have taught me anything, it’s to be empirically skeptical of unknown sources. It could be by the time I wake up on Friday morning this will be all over the Guardian and Evening Standard, and there will be a celebratory .gif thread. I’m still in a wait-and-see mode, but this report could be a big news story that will be confirmed shortly.

Until then, gird your loins and be cautiously optimistic. And for God’s sake, nobody move.