BREAKING (and I use that word loosely): Folarin Balogun scored the decisive goal as Monaco beat Marseille 2-1 on Sunday to extend their Ligue 1 winning run to SEVEN matches, and Sources close to sources tell me we are approximately 72 hours from the first "should he come back to England?" thinkpiece appearing on your timeline like a rash.

Look, I've been doing this long enough to know the pattern. An English-born, American international striker leaves Arsenal, goes to the south of France, starts banging them in, and suddenly every pundit in Britain acts like they personally discovered him while he was doing kickabouts on Holloway Road. It's a cycle. It's beautiful. It's inevitable. And I've taken the liberty of documenting the nine distinct stages.

Stage 1: The Quiet Departure. Player leaves Premier League club. Nobody really notices. The club's fan forum has one thread titled "Balogun gone, thoughts?" with four replies, two of which are "who?" and one of which is a broken image link.

Stage 2: The Settling In Period. Player does a few interviews in which they describe Monaco as "beautiful" and the food as "different class." Football Twitter ignores this entirely because someone at Tottenham has said something daft again.

Stage 3: The First Decent Run of Form. Player scores three in five and American soccer accounts go absolutely ballistic. Every goal is captioned "HE'S HIM" in capital letters. English accounts remain unmoved.

Stage 4: The Ligue 1 Dismissal. Someone with an egg avatar and a Opta subscription replies to every highlight with "it's the French league mate, my nan could score there." Your nan could not score there. Your nan struggles with the self-checkout at Tesco. Leave Ligue 1 alone.

Stage 5: The Undeniable Purple Patch. This is where we are NOW. Seven straight league wins. Beating Marseille, who are no mugs, in a match with genuine Champions League implications. Balogun looking like a striker who has figured out where the goal lives and has moved in permanently. At this stage, the "farmers league" brigade start to go suspiciously quiet.

Stage 6: The Pundit Pivot. A former Premier League midfielder on a Monday Night Football segment casually drops "I always thought Balogun had something about him" as though they didn't spend three years calling him "that lad Arsenal let go." The graphics department hurriedly assembles a Ligue 1 stats package they clearly made twenty minutes before the show.

Stage 7: The Transfer Whispers. This is MY domain and I will not be denied. Sources close to sources tell me that at least four Premier League clubs are "monitoring" Balogun, which as we all know means someone at the club has a functioning internet connection and access to Transfermarkt. I'm hearing Manchester United, obviously, because they are contractually obligated to be linked with every striker on the European continent.

Stage 8: The "He's Basically French Now" Phase. Player does an interview in halting French. Gets praised for "embracing the culture." Is photographed at a restaurant that doesn't serve chips. English tabloids run the headline "GONE NATIVE" next to a picture of him holding a glass of something that isn't Lucozade.

Stage 9: The Inevitable Return. Player signs for a Premier League club for four times what Monaco paid. Scores once in his first three games. Gets injured. The cycle begins anew with a different young striker who has just been loaned to Nice.

Now, will Balogun actually complete all nine stages? Possibly not. The lad is 24, Monaco are genuinely pushing for the Champions League, and Ligue 1 is a proper league regardless of what your nan's grandson says on Reddit. But the machine is already whirring. I can hear it. The scouts are booking flights to the Côte d'Azur and claiming it's "work."

Seven wins in a row. A Champions League spot within reach. An American international born in New York, raised in London, thriving in the south of France. Football's most internationally confused success story, and I am HERE for every bewildering chapter of it.

More as I inevitably make it up.