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#3 Ryan Babel’s helicopter trip to nowhere (2010)
As the summer deadline day loomed in August 2010, one player who appeared to be on the brink of a move was Liverpool’s Dutch winger Ryan Babel. The former Ajax man had spent 3 seasons at Anfield but had largely fallen out of favour going into the 2010-11 season after narrowly missing out on an £8m move to Birmingham City during the previous window.
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Tottenham and West Ham were both rumoured to be interested in his signature, and so on the 31st August deadline day, reports began to flood in that the Dutchman had boarded a helicopter in Liverpool, with London being his likely destination.
Hours later though, things took a bizarre twist when Babel posted on his Twitter page that he was “going nowhere” and also stated he was “LFC all the way”. And although a £5m offer from Spurs was reportedly accepted by Liverpool, the Dutchman ended up staying with the Reds, with then-Spurs boss Harry Redknapp going onto suggest the deal was nowhere near done anyway.
So where exactly had Babel’s helicopter journey taken him? A decade on, we still don’t know, and truthfully, there was no real proof that he made the trip in the first place. Regardless, this odd incident added a new word into football’s lexicon – Babelcopter – and remains well-remembered today.
