Transfer Speculation: Yaya Toure (Barcelona) to Chelsea/Man United

It's a kind of unwritten rule that European footballers who want a pay hike talk to their agents who drop little hints that their man want to come to Arsenal/Chelsea/Man United/Liverpool (delete as applicable). But it is rarer for agents to give the hurry-up simply to get their boy a game!

Today The Mirror have Yaya Toure's agent, Dimitri Seluk, threatening Barcelona if Toure continues to be not (considered) good enough:

"We are not happy with this obviously. He is not playing. It is very strange not to be having minutes. If a team like Chelsea or Manchester United would come to us, we are obviously open to talking without any kind of problem."

Now you can see the motivation in this, Toure wants to play - Barca feel they have better options so Toure wants to force Barca to play him.

But to be honest if Toure were to go to Manchester United or Chelsea would he be guaranteed to start every game? No. Although he may get more games than he is currently getting at Barca he is hardly likely to be an automatic starter until he's bedded in.

There are few likely bidders in England for his services for a couple of reasons.

With the Africa Cup of Nations about to start Toure will probably be unavailable for much of January (Ivory Coast's first game is on 11 January - the final on 31 January); especially as Ivory Coast, as a top seed, has a routine looking group stage playing Burkino Faso, Togo and Ghana. This will limit his involvement in the second half of the season and make negotiations and a medical tricky.

Secondly Chelsea could do with less reliance on Africans in the engine room - if losing two defensive midfielders is bad, then losing a third for a month in the middle of every other season would simply be bad planning. United will have Hargreaves back in the next couple of weeks and with Gibson still developing may feel that there is adequate cover for Fletcher, Anderson and Carrick.

Thirdly, Barca will be looking at the fee that Liverpool extracted from Real Madrid for Xabi Alonso and there is little doubt that they would also look for £30m for Toure.

Yaya Toure is a top player and would improve the midfield of either Manchester United or Chelsea - but buying key African players during their Championship is a risky business and for United waiting until the summer would be preferable. For Chelsea the impending ban may force their hand in the market - but there will be better value for money available.

Probability: 2/5