The rumours range from the unbelievable to the profoundly disturbing to the plain laughable, but at least they gives us something to talk about during the summer.
The big rumour of the past few days is that Brett Emerton will be arriving from Feyenoord, with the Mail on Sunday adding that his arrival will signal the end of Nobby Solano’s spell on Tyneside.
The Mail on Sunday further claimed that we are in a bidding war with Liverpool to sign Gareth Southgate from the Smoggies, despite numerous denials from all parties concerned.
A £1.5million bid for Leeds United’s injury-prone striker Michael Bridges was the Sunday People’s big if hardly original story.
The News of the World contained the truly shocking story that we are prepared to offer West Ham reject Lee Bowyer £65,000 per week to sign for us instead of Arsenal - obviously ignoring the fact that he wouldn’t get anywhere near our team nor Arsenal’s.
The Journal claim to have an inside track on the Sir Bobby’s transfer targets, again reporting that bids for full backs Stephen Carr of Spurs and Wayne Bridge of Southampton are imminent.
Barcelona striker Patrick Kluivert is still top of our most wanted list according to the Northern Echo, which reports that he may be available for as little as £1.5million.
But James Beattie appears to be off the shopping list (if he was ever on it) after insisting that he is happy at St Mary’s and looking forward to playing in Europe next season.
Other names dotted around various less than scrupulous websites include Sean Davis of Fulham and David Dunn of Blackburn Rovers, despite Tony Parkes claiming last month that Newcastle had contacted Graeme Souness to say they weren’t interested in signing Dunn.
Amongst the various foreign players linked are Andy van der Meyde of Ajax, Sandro of Malaga, Javier Portillo of Real Madrid, Josep Guardiola of Brescia and Bernardo Corradi of Lazio.
And falling into the very unlikely category are the claims that Rivaldo and Marco Delvecchio could be on their way.
As always most of these are a case of believe them when you see them, and my (totally uninformed) guess would be that only one of these players will be pulling on the black and white stripes next season.