Fernando Torres and Pepe Reina Ready to Quit Liverpool In January

June 18, 2010 - Potchefstroom, South Africa - epa02209826 Spanish goalkeeper Pepe Reina (L) chats with Spanish forward Fernando Torres during their team's training session in Potchesfstroom, South Africa, 18 June 2010. Spain will face Honduras on 21 June at the Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg in a Group H match at the South Africa 2010 FIFA World Cup.

For those readers expecting to read a juicy story about why Torres and Reina are ready to quit Liverpool in January, I apologize.

You see, The Daily Mirror published a story about it last night. Whether its true or not, well have to wait and see, but Im sure it gave the Mirror the traffic it wanted despite there being no sources named in the article. Essentially the story claims that both Torres and Reina have escape clauses in their contracts and they both plan on telling the Liverpool management that they plan on exercising those clauses in January to move to bigger clubs. Yesterday The Mirror reported that Reina was a target for Manchester United.

Its often hard to know how truthful these stories are. Is it conceivable? Sure. Will the Liverpool owners or manager refute the claims this week and vehemently deny that the clauses exist? Well have to wait and see.

One resource to put The Daily Mirrors story into perspective is the Football Transfer League website which monitors the accuracy of transfer stories mentioned in British newspapers. In the defense of the newspapers, a story may be accurate but then a player, agent or club may change his mind which would make the story null and void. But it at least gives us a good insight of how newspapers rank against each other. For example, The Daily Mirror has a 16.2% accuracy when writing about Liverpool transfers and how often they come true.

Out of the 14 British newspapers t! hat are tracked, The Daily Mirror is ranked fourth from bottom when the accuracy of their transfer rumors are measured. In addition to that, The Daily Mirror is ranked number three for the most number of transfer rumors published each day. The paper publishes an average of 3.05 per day since the summer 2006 transfer window.

So based on The Daily Mirrors track record, I wouldnt put too much faith in their story about Torres and Reina being accurate. In fact, it makes you wonder what the point of The Mirror is especially when you realize that the vast majority of articles they publish are regarding transfer rumors. Take those away and youre not left with much else. Of the top 10 most read stories on their site right now, nine of them are transfer-related. The Mirror obviously realizes that as much as we, the public, dislike being sold down the river, we eat up transfer speculation. So as long as we continue clicking on those type of stories, theyll continue focusing their efforts on writing them because it generates ad revenue and sells papers.

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