Bat Country: Paraguayan midfielder says deal in place to join Tottenham

We’re all recovering from the gut punch that Tottenham Hotspur received earlier today as the club was drawn against Manchester City in the Champions League quarterfinal. Given how the last few weeks have been gloomy around here, we need something to laugh at. Thankfully, Dispatches from Bat Country never lets us down, and we have an absolute whopper of a story to share.

The writer’s room has been in standard Friday mode talking about the draw, our chances at Top Four and more important things like who should win Top Chef. That all changed when the following tweet from Sport Witness was dropped into the chat:

Oh, cool! Transfer rumors are fun and it gives us hope that we’ll actually sign someone after two windows of crickets.

Then we read the article and began laughing.

In the article, Torres and his agent stated that they have agreed in principle to a deal that sends the Paraguayan midfielder to Tottenham Hotspur. These comments were made on the TV show “La Revista El Dia.” It sounds promising enough, but the story is just so weird and wild from this point out.

This all may sound like a done deal at first, with the 21-year-old joining the Tottenham squad for next season. But little by little, you realise how strange this story is.

First is the way the Spurs move is being announced. It was the TV who said it’s happening, and asked Gonzalo Acier to explain every detail of it. The representative said ‘his work is to seek pre-agreements, a better club’, and claimed the offer ‘was received 15 days ago’.

Torres himself claimed “it would be a pride to go there (Tottenham) and show the quality and what I’m going for”.

Going further into the story, it appears that the agreement is a one year loan with a purchase option after it’s over. At least that’s what it sounds like, but the agent flip flops and seems to mix up the transfer information.

So why is all of this the battiest of bat country articles?

Simple: From what we can tell, he’s never played for this club.

Torres is 21 years old and his rights are owned by Club Blooming Santa Cruz in the top division of Bolivia. We have to take this information at face value because if you look up the club on Transfermarkt or even Wikipedia, he is nowhere to be found. Like, at all. No first team listing, not even a youth club listing.

The article has a clip of what the agent says, so nothing new will come from viewing that other than seeing “TURBO TORRES” in what is a still shot of him on a pitch.

Digging further, you’ll find that there is almost no individual information on Torres at all. I can find the profile of Julio Cesar, the Brazilian goalkeeper. I can also find a guy in IMDB named Julio Cesar Torres! There’s just nothing.

So we have the strangest bat country yet. Usually we don’t have quotes, proper sourcing, and a whole lot of speculation when dealing with these transfers. Here we have agent and player quotes, two separate video clips of them conducting interviews with networks that don’t believe a word of this and an aggregator besides us who is mocking the entire thing.

It’s awesome.

Maybe this is like Odemwingie where he just shows up with a suitcase and a pair of boots, ready to play! Other than that situation, it’s ludicrous to think that this player is going to even end up in the senior squad of his own club, let alone at Tottenham Hotspur next season.