Mesut Özil is very unlikely to move to Inter Milan in January, despite some reports to the contrary in the last week.

With Mesut in the last year of his current deal, there seems to be a new team linked with the German every week. This week it was Inter Milan, with the Daily Mail reporting that Arsenal’s playmaker is a January target for the Italians, according to ‘quotes’ from president Erick Thohir.

However, sportwitness.co.uk have picked up on the fact that the original quotes from Thohir state just the opposite – that they would not be likely to target Özil in January.

First he says on the Özil rumours that they are just “gossip”, and later he goes on to say that he wouldn’t necessarily want to make a move in the winter window anyway, explaining: “Lots of purchases in the winter are not optimal, an example from my time when bringing in Lukas Podolski and Xherdan Shaqiri.”

Podolski scored one goal in 18 appearances for Inter, whilst Shaqiri scored three in 20. Both only lasted half a season before moving on somewhere else, and that’s clearly stuck in the Inter president’s mind.

So realistically we’re just left with the possibility of a summer move, and given that the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United have all been linked with a summer move for Mesut, Inter are bound to have a lot of competition in this regard.