Oh that I agree with. Private conversations are almost impossible to police or even be aware of, and I'm sure it goes on the whole time. But there's a world of difference between let's say Fabian Delph saying that he'd had a private conversation with Micah Richards in which he consulted him for advice about moving to City, and Richards publicly coming out telling any hack who would listen that moving to City is a career-ending move. The former is a perfectly rational and normal thing to do, especially in a career that has a life span of 15 years max. and one wrong move can screw it all up for good. The latter is completely unnecessary and does absolutely nothing for the player in question, other than to pile pressure on his current club to sell and sell for a lower price.
I'm certainly not 'outraged', I just find it disrespectful to the integrity of a club and the game as a whole that certain teams are able to make such a public song and dance about a transfer. Unlike a private conversation, it unsettles the entire training ground, disappoints the fans, and can have wider ramifications in portraying a club as a 'weak' 'selling' club.
I'm sure you went through a whole media circus the summer Barca moved for Suarez, albeit that was tempered by the fact that he was serving a lengthy ban and may well have been sold anyway by your board for his behaviour damaging the image of the club. If you took that circus and multiplied it by the circumference of the sun in centimetres, you'd grasp the crap we went through during the summer of Bale. From early April, ex-Madrid players (and there are hundreds of them) were giving interviews at every opportunity decidedly telling the world that Bale would be better off at Real. This unsettled the player and the club throughout that summer, as an air of uncertainty hung around the club. It was obvious to any sane person that he'd never be able to turn down a move from Madrid, so why make it so public and in-your-face unpleasant when the only reason Spurs were delaying (and I'm sure Levy communicated this to Perez) was to bring in replacements before the sale went ahead?
The fact that so few clubs worldwide actively encourage those private conversations to become as public as possible shows that the majority of teams still see the practice as ethically questionable and against the spirit of the game.
but it's pretty common practice for legends of the game to assist in coaxing player's to their respective clubs just in case you didn't know 
perhaps now this silly idea of you getting in the top 4 will be put to bed and mass delusion turns instead into mass realisation. Don't fret, I'll wave as we go past ya
