The Warm-Up: Fonte gets dream move to West Ham, City sign record teen

After trying and failing to buy a succession of strikers in bargain deals that no selling club would ever consider in their right minds, and then seeing their chief creative influence demote himself to the Under-23s, pissing all over Slaven Bilic’s chips like Hayden Foxe at a central London bar, West Ham have clearly chosen to take a slightly different tack in the transfer market.

While Marseille weigh up making another offer for Dimitri Payet and his badly damaged reputation, the Hammers have been busy working on a centre-back, Jose Fonte to be precise, and are poised to announce an £8m deal for the Southampton defender, who like the Frenchman has been exiled from his own side of late.

It’s undeniably something of a climbdown for Fonte, just six months after he was strongly linked with a move to Manchester United to work under Jose Mourinho. Maybe it would be timely to cast our focus back to the summer and see what he said back then about his failure to join Paul Pogba and Zlatan Ibrahimovic in moving to Old Trafford..

“Was I disappointed the Man United move didn’t happen? Let’s leave that for another time… I’ve lots of targets: to play in the Champions League, to play in a World Cup, to win a trophy in England.”

Cristiano, it’s all down to you again.

The Africa Cup of Nations has been of inconsistent quality so far but Senegal look like living up to expectations. On Thursday they beat Zimbabwe 2-0 to take firm control of Group B with two wins from two. Sadio Mane opened the scoring - of course he did - by tucking in from a tight angle before Henri Saivet (on loan at St Etienne from Newcastle) thumped home an absolutely belting free-kick.

In the other game in Group B, the team we are contractually obliged to describe as ‘Riyad Mahrez’s Algeria’ went down 2-1 to Tunisia to leave them on the brink of elimination with just one point from two games. See the highlights here:

Last night, Barcelona secured a 1-0 win in the first leg of their Copa del Rey quarter-final against Real Sociedad, with the goal from Ney…. No. The Warm-Up can’t keep this up. Everything is not okay. DONALD TRUMP IS THE NEW PRESIDENT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IS THIS FAKE NEWS IS THIS THE REAL LIFE IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD!!!! FGHFDHSFGFSGFDG!!!!!

*Ahem* And back to business…

What were you doing at the age of 13? Friday’s Warm-Up was watching Euro 96 and trying to get tickets for Oasis at Knebworth, all the while harbouring a crushing inability to talk to girls. It certainly wasn’t getting a big-money move to a global football superpower. But it is not like that for Finley Burns, the Southend youth teamer who, it is revealed on the back page of The Times, has signed for Manchester City for a record fee of £175,000, possibly rising to £250,000.

“City’s investment in Burns is unprecedented for a player of his age,” writes The Times, just in case you weren’t sure what the word ‘record’ means. There is no suggestion as to which position he plays at this stage, but City’s scouts are said to have been impressed by his goalhanging while playing with a foam ball round the back of the science block.

If you had managed to forget that back in the summer, Manchester City had agreed a deal for one of the best Brazilian talents out there, Gabriel Jesus, you could not have missed it yesterday. City plastered his endearing grin all over their social media channels and even got him flogging clobber before he had even had much of a chance to obliterate Claudio Bravo’s remaining confidence in training.

It was quite the social media assault from City as they talked up their potential saviour of a season which is threatening to fall apart completely. If only he shared a name with, say, a famous figure from history with a resurrection habit.

The simpering love-in was all a bit much really: The Warm-Up now feels it knows Gabriel Jesus better than it knows its own mother. Still, at least the City Twitter account's output has at least improved since this:

This flashed up in our Twitter feed yesterday. It needs no further introduction. Sometimes the most basic sells are the most rewarding.

A whole bunch of stuff. In the Africa Cup of Nations you’ve Ivory Coast v DR Congo at 4pm and Morocco v Togo at 7pm - both of which are live on Eurosport. BT Sport has Freiburg v Bayern Munich from 7.30pm while the domestic offering on Friday night sees promotion-chasing Brighton host Sheffield Wednesday on Sky Sports 1. But watch the Eurosport ones eh?