Mourinho: if Ibra wants to leave, we won’t stop him

Round and round the rumour mill goes, and where it stops, nobody knows. Today, for example, it’s apparently making a quick stop at Old Trafford to collect Zlatan Ibrahimovic, before heaving the big Swede all the way over to the west coast of the USA, home of the Los Angeles Galaxy. That’s what ESPN’s sources reckon.

True? Perhaps. Certainly, the arrival of Alexis Sanchez means that Ibrahimovic is now well down the striking pecking order, even if Jose Mourinho does love a big forward. Additionally, his recovery from injury has been a lengthy process: as Mourinho put it a few weeks ago, he’s “a 36-year-old with a bad knee”. He’s also still a superstar, however, and so the idea of a final hurrah in MLS seems to make a certain amount of sense.

Anyway, Mourinho was asked about this at his press conference. Though he said he’d heard nothing of the move from the player himself, only from the press, he also added that:

if that is true and Zlatan wants a future in another club, in another country, we are here to help and to create conditions for it to happen — not to make his life difficult. But the last thing that Zlatan told me was he wants to recover totally and feel ready to help the team.

One to watch, we suspect.