The Dying Thrill of the Transfer Window
Joe Marshall- @AllSportJoe
Lets be honest, there is nothing pure about a modern football transfer. There isn’t anything particularly pure about any aspect of modern football, but transfer dealings are some of the murkiest waters the modern game has to navigate. From greedy agents sucking every penny from desperate clubs, to the immoral tapping up of young players, the completion of a transfer in 2023 is as honest as a Tory politician describing what they got up to in lockdown.
The way we view transfers though is changing, the days of checking the football news on page 302 of Ceefax for dozen word rumours are long gone, and instead we have a new age of gossip, with news shared to millions with the press of a single blue button, usually accompanied by three little words; Here. We. Go.
This new prism through which we consume football news has damaged my love for this time of year. Seeing that Club X was in for Player Y used to be exciting, because one day you’d hear the rumour, then a week or so later they would sign. Or they wouldn’t. That would be that. No prolonged sagas, and even if there was, you wouldn’t know about it, because we as fans didn’t need to know. No one knew the ins and outs of every single deal, no one was tracking private planes on Flight Radar or fretting about every single aspect of a transfer. Most importantly, no one cared, because it didn’t matter to us.
I place a lot of the blame for this new culture on the celebrity journalists, those that have made a career from being the first to break every single piece of news, no matter how insignificant it is in the bigger picture. I’m referring to the Ornsteins and the Romanos of this joy-sucking world. Being first in a competitive industry is the USP of these people, who are now often more famous than some of the players they write about. This pursuit of exclusivity is not a bad thing in itself, however I believe that the culture of football news consumption is suffering because of it. I remember the days when club football would finish in May, and the remainder of the summer would be filled with other things, but unfortunately that has changed, as the news cycle that these people peddle continues to turn at the same rate as it does when actual matches are being played. I really wish that we could all switch off from football for at least a week or so, but alas we can’t, one blink and you’re a month out of date with your gossip.
Fans have become so used to living and breathing every twist and turn of a deal that they now feel entitled to know each time a contract is put on the table, and every time it gets taken off. They demand to know the smallprint of their proposed contracts, image rights, bonuses and every other possible clause an agent can wriggle in to the agreement.
The question I ask myself is “why?” Why do we want to know everything at the earliest possible convenience? I understand that passion for our clubs drives us to want to learn everything we possibly can about what they are getting up to, but the obsession for a constant stream of information has taken over. How good would it be if the suspense remained throughout the summer and we found out, out of the blue who had arrived? Imagine if the first time you saw a new signing in your team’s kit was when they actually put it on their back for the first time, not some photoshopped image posted by a journalist’s PR team. Football transfers used to be exciting, but now they are just another way for us to be reminded of the direction in which football is heading. A constant, unnecessary ego massage for a group of people who really shouldn’t be as important as they are.