The wild £51m transfer claim that Man Utd, Liverpool, and Chelsea should be very wary of

Somebody, somewhere, is being fickle. Either its the gossip columnists, plucking from the zeitgeist to shovel names like coal into the ravenous mouths of their speculative furnaces, or its the clubs, compiling their scout reports from half-hearted glances at the trending page on the app FKA Twitter.

It is a pattern that we have seen repeated ever since some football-adjacent genius realised that you could monetise curiosity and good form; a player shines on a grand stage, and within weeks, their name is plastered across the back pages of various publications from here to Mars. Next up for their fifteen minutes in the limelight, Ademola Lookman.

You may remember him from his slightly underwhelming spell with Everton, or perhaps his slightly underwhelming spell with Fulham. Real aficionados might even recall his slightly underwhelming spell with Leicester City. But ever since the nippy forward bid a permanent farewell to the rigours of the English game, he has been sparkling ever more iridescently for Atalanta over in Italy.

Indeed, it was for the Serie A stalwarts that Lookman enjoyed the most auspicious moment of his professional career to date. Just last month the 26-year-old scored a hat-trick in the Europa League final to hand a first and only defeat of the campaign to Xabi Alonso’s insatiable Bayer Leverkusen side, and to secure a historic continental triumph for his Italian employers.

Ever since then, his moniker has been bandied around by the usual suspects, but the proverbial ante has now been upped somewhat by a report from those mischievous keyboard hammerers at CalcioMercato. According to the outlet, Lookman is being, well, looked at by none other than Chelsea, Liverpool, and Manchester United. It is claimed that all three Premier League heavyweights would be willing to pay around £50.7 million to lure the Nigeria international back to England.

Now, granted, Lookman is a fine player, and one who has registered 17 goals and 10 assists across 45 appearances for Atalanta over the past season. But whether there is any veracity in one Champions League qualification hopeful - let alone three - being willing to fork out in excess of £50 million for his signature seems rather doubtful. It wasn’t so very long ago that Paul Joyce of The Telegraph suggested that the attacker could be sold for as little as £30 million this summer.

If Joye is right, that means that either Atalanta have bumped up their asking price by two thirds in the past month, or that CalcioMercato are simply making things up as they go along. Far be it from us to speculate on which is more likely. But whichever it is, this feels like a wild report, and one that Chelsea, Liverpool, and United should all be wary of. If they are genuinely interested in Lookman, then they should not be paying £50 million to sign him. If they are not, then they would be well-advised to avoid a sudden change of heart.

By no means is he a bad player, but whether he is of a level that any of that aforementioned triumvirate require is a matter of some debate. At CalcioMercato’s apparent price point, may we never find out the answer for sure.