Manchester United boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer faces key decisions over which players he should offload during the summer transfer window.
‘David Brooks' was the top Twitter trend for much of Wednesday amid links with United, it was the turn of ‘Diogo Dalot' on Thursday.
The Portuguese right-back may have become a forgotten man in a world without the internet, but all it took was one transfer report linking him with a possible exit — and a homemade video reel of his best United moments — to stir the debate once again.
Yet whereas the discussion on Brooks was unfairly slanted towards an unfavourable Jadon Sancho comparison, the prevailing opinion on Dalot seemed to be one of sympathy.
Many believe the 21-year-old deserves a second chance at United, though some went a little too far in suggesting he was a better option than Aaron Wan-Bissaka.
You do wonder, however, if they have a point and whether Dalot has endured an unjustly rough time of it in the past year.
Partially due to injuries, but also from a seeming lack of trust from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the former Porto youngster has been marginalised.
His first team minutes totalled just 327 in the 2019/20 season, 66 of those in the Premier League.
Nobody who has watched United over the past year should be suggesting that Dalot is superior to Wan-Bissaka, but when you see big clubs like Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain touted for a transfer, it should tell you that he's worth retaining.
Solskjaer will need to rotate his side as Champions League football returns to Old Trafford next season.
And Dalot has experience on the biggest stage for United; who can forget his penalty-winning moment against PSG, which capped an excellent substitute performance?
In short, United would struggle to find an alternative at right-back who offers the qualities Dalot can bring. Offloading him to a Champions League rival would be a mistake.
Equally, it may be foolish to bid farewell to Jesse Lingard and Juan Mata, who are also among the United players being linked with an exit this summer.
Lingard's struggles on and off the field in the past 18 months have been well documented, but at the end of the season his confidence appeared to be flowing back, shown by two goals in two games.
At present he looks a better bench option than Daniel James or Andreas Pereira to fill in out wide or in attacking midfield.
Mata, meanwhile, has lost what little pace he had, but is a wily playmaker who still possesses that precious ability to cut through a team with a simple pass.
Much of the talk around Brooks was ill-judged because fans saw him as a guaranteed starter.
But as Solskjaer said, the transfer search this summer is not about the ‘marquee' names, but strengthening the squad as a whole.
The Bournemouth winger would be a superb squad player, used in rotation with Mata and Lingard.
And Dalot is not prime Cafu. He is not Gary Neville. He's not even Aaron Wan-Bissaka. But that does not necessarily mean he should be forgotten and sold.
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The transfer market is much more nuanced than the Twitter mob will have you believe.
This article was most recently revised and updated 4 years ago
