Sheva to RBNY or New England? That’s a New One.

By: Martha | December 4th, 2007

After one of those two goals. Virtually from the moment he landed in London and received his first glare of disgust from Jose Mourinho, the football rumor mill has been spinning out stories about Andriy Shevchenko and his seemingly inevitable departure from Chelsea.

Milan’s desperate attempts to get him back on the cheap failed last summer, but club VP Adriano Galliani’s love hasn’t flagged for a second, and given Milan’s total inability to get consistent scoring from a striker since the Ukrainian left, you can be damn sure they still want him, particularly at the new, “Everything must go!” price Chelsea are now supposedly asking. There is, however, an alleged new suitor: AC Milan, meet your competition, Mr. MLS.

According to England’s Daily Mirror (the stories in which are generally on par as those that emerge at the end of a very long game of Telephone, both in terms of truthiness and pure, cracked-out fun), if it’s all the same to Chelsea, Sheva may forgo a return to either Milan or Dynamo Kiev in favor of a move to MLS. His wife, after all, is American, and after the hell of failing to live up to expectations with Chelea, part of him is probably eager for a place where he’ll be welcomed with shrieks of joy, and has a good chance of succeeding. No matter what you say about the man’s current form, the level of the opposition and the pace of the games in MLS are a much lower than they are in England, both of which would make things a whole lot easier for poor Sheva. (Of course, so is the service for strikers, but Juan Pablo Angel managed to do ok with it, so it’s clearly good enough.)

The claim in the Mirror is that both RBNY and New England are interested in Shevchenko, though the price is sure to be massive. RBNY have money and, if they really are looking to restructure Claudio Reyna’s contract and get him off the DP list, could theoretically fit Sheva on their roster. Whether they’d want him, however, would probably have more to do with who else is available — they had talks with old man Luis Figo last season, and he’s made noises about MLS already this year. (And, since his contract ends this summer, he wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.) I know nothing about the Revolution’s DP situation, but they seem to have a pretty productive strike force in place and are already an MLS power. Would they want a big name, just for the sake of glitz and glamor?