It has been at least a couple of days since the silly season threw anything the way of the New York Red Bulls. But The Sun put that right on Saturday with the suggestion Bolton Wanderers' boss Neil Lennon is "trying to bring MLS sensation Bradley Wright-Philips back to England for the rest of the season."

The gist of it, as relayed by fan site Burnden Aces, is Bolton could use some help up front, because recent signings Emile Heskey and Eidur Gudjohnsen are 37 and 36 respectively, and top scorer Craig Davies is injured.

So sure: Bolton could use a striker; BWP is a striker. And he would appear to be in England, or at the very least thinking about his home country.

London

— Brad Wright-Phillips (@TheRealBWP) January 10, 2026

But don't fret, red-hot RBNY reporter Kristian Dyer brings a confident statement from a source at RBNY: no one from Bolton has reached out to the club.

BWP is, of course, on a recently-signed Designated Player contract with RBNY. He might well be a transfer target for any number of teams in search of a reliable finisher. But he would be an odd choice for the Red Bulls to allow to slip away on loan: his transfer value is unlikely to get much higher, since he will turn 30 in March and 30+ goal seasons in MLS are not as easy to achieve as those who overlooked him in MVP voting appear to think. To loan him out would be to risk a great deal (loss of form, loss of perceived value, disenchantment with the team that sent him away) for little immediate return (clearing room and cap space on a roster that would seem to have an abundance of both).

RBNY's pre-season is due to start in about two weeks. There will surely be some additions to the squad in that time, and some of them may necessitate the exit of one or two hitherto key players. RBNY's Dreamwrecker-in-Chief Ali Curtis has already shown himself to have a gift for the counter-intuitive: if he can drive out the club's most successful coaching team within a couple of weeks of being hired, he is absolutely capable of trading the team's best-ever single-season scoring record holder before watching a single training session.

Thankfully, it would seem Curtis's appetite for chasing out the heroes of RBNY's recent past is sated. For now.