It’s that time of year again. No football at weekends, no World Cup or Euros to distract us. It’s doubly annoying this year because there would be a World Cup but for an inane, financially driven decision to move it to Qatar in the winter – and because we are being subjected to another round of pointless international friendlies nobody cares about masquerading as a competition.
While football-free weekends are frankly weird, they do have their advantages. The truth is I sometimes wish I didn’t care so much about the stupid game and its absence is enormously helpful to family life as my schedule is suddenly way more flexible. Unfortunately, the lack of football is no longer replaced by cricket, Wimbledon or barbecues in the attention spans of many football supporters and journalists: into the void sails the hellish hysteria of the transfer window. While sports washing, resurgent hooliganism, VAR and silly tribalism may take the Champions League places for ‘worst things about modern football’, the transfer window is a strong Europa League contender with a good chance in the cups.
Once upon a time, we vaguely followed transfer speculation on the back pages – now, social media and 24 hour sports news have made the transfer window a kind of party for all the most tiresome football followers. Continuing the theme, the Champions League places go the following.
ITKs. ‘In the knows’. Twitter in particular is full of people who reckon to have ‘inside information’ about transfers. The likelihood of some average bloke on social media knowing more than journalists whose job it is to build relationships with players and agents is roughly nil, but it doesn’t stop people setting up accounts claiming to know what’s going on – in some cases building legions of gullible followers. A classic M.O. is to throw out lots of speculation as fact, get lucky once or twice with guesses and then build an army of true believers. These weirdos tweet ‘BREAKING NEWS’ as if they were the BBC, or ‘DONE DEAL’ about transfers that may or may not happen but are certainly not confirmed, and the daft and desperate suck it up. New accounts appear every window, some even claiming to be football agents. Yes, likes and follows matter that much to some strange men.
Desperado fans. The deluded come in various guises – those following the ITKs, those continually asking journalists for updates or tweeting ‘announce (player)’ every time their club posts something. But the worst ones are those who seem to genuinely care more about transfers than they do about their team’s results. I’ve lost count of the number of transfer windows Everton have ‘won’ since they last won an actual trophy in 1995, and last year we were told that Manchester United’s signings of Ronaldo, Sancho and Varane made them title contenders (how’d that work out?). Incredibly, the early part of the season even sees ‘fans’ who think the world is like Football Manager or FIFA almost celebrating any bad results for their team, so they can castigate the owners for lacking the ‘ambition’ of state-sponsored clubs like Manchester City. Being right matters most and the world is like Football Manager, you buy and sell 5 or 6 players every summer and ‘upgrade’ anyone over 30…though it’s hard to remember an actual team in real life doing that and being successful. Mate, I know you took Peterborough to European glory in a computer game but – and I know this is hard to believe – it was just a computer game.
‘Bantz’ bros. Fans can covet players consistently from other teams for months or even years – but the minute he joins a rival, he’s absolutely rubbish, they have overpaid laughably and he is going to be a gigantic flop. This mentality leads to long, fruitless and circular arguments bringing in everything from comparative club histories to disputed refereeing decisions – but essentially, it’s the sort of half-witted, one-eyed tribalism that a six year old should be ashamed of.
Amateur accountants. A major sub-category of the deluded are those who add up reported transfer fees, subtract outgoings from incomings and come up with a ‘net’ figure that takes no account of salaries, existing wage bills and bonuses, global pandemics or anything other than their desire for their team to buy more and more footballers. To see them pricing up players they clearly think are useless for billions while wanting to buy world class players for peanuts is pretty much the opening salvo of the whole madness. Net spend – the amount a club generates in transfer fees being subtracted from its spending – has a certain logic. But unless you’re the club accountant, you don’t actually know what the financial position is or how much they can afford in transfers – and unless you have a sugar daddy or oil rich state for owners, it’s not going to be anything like what you spend in your favourite computer game. Special mention here for those who condemn teams like Man City and PSG for their ownership models but would celebrate Darth Vader buying their own club if he had those kind of resources.
Football twitter can be silly at the best of times, but at this time of year, it descends in to a kind of collective madness. The bottom line: clubs will spend what they can afford, players don’t feel the same way about football clubs as fans do, nobody knows at this stage whether a given transfer will work out. All the rest is irritating, tiresome, often moronic noise.
Rory writes 