THIS column is being written on the day before the biannual farce that is the transfer window comes to its latest sad conclusion.
There will no doubt be the usual last minute deals done, though what that says about football management in general is basically that most club owners, executives and managers don’t have a clue about what they are doing in the long term.
For if they really knew what they were about, the clubs would have made their signings many weeks ago.
Don’t listen to all that guff about ‘waiting for the right price/offer’ as it’s all just so much hype.
It is one of the many frustrating aspects of the transfer window that it produces such deadline day scrambles. For how can anyone pretend that signing somebody on the last day of August is either good planning or good management? And how can any player be expected to integrate properly into a squad that’s already had a whole pre-season of training and maybe competitive matches together?
It used to be in the bad old days that big clubs could sign a player from a small club at any time of the year, and the injustice of that was all too obvious, because whenever a major club got into trouble they could splash the cash and strengthen in mid-season when other clubs simply could not afford to do so and often had to sell on their best players.
That was why the transfer window system was set up, to stop such obviously advantageous moves by the big clubs. But the window has made the whole of professional football look incompetent and greedy, completely out of touch with the ordinary football fan and just so much corporate manoeuvring.
So why prolong the window nonsense?
Of course every worker has the right to go whenever he or she wants, especially if they are going to be paid more money, but with the lunacy that is going on at the moment – Paris Saint-Germain buying Neymar for £200 million, ‘nuff said – and deals being done in the tens of millions for players who are no more than average, we have to question the whole transfer system itself.
Dress it up all you like, but the transfer system is legalised slavery. If not, then why should it be that clubs can sell an individual when that player doesn’t really want to go?
Does it not make nonsense of contracts that they can be torn up – by clubs and players alike – as soon as a large-enough offer is made?
It might upset agents and the likes of Celtic who have a business model that depends on buying cheap and selling dear – the secret of good business everywhere – and it’ll certainly annoy those clubs who have laid out ludicrous sums to acquire what they consider to be assets, but the governing body of football must now really try and find another way of players going to and from clubs.
For the transfer system is a joke, a bad joke, and fans everywhere are questioning why it is allowed to exist.
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