WELL thank god that irritating fiasco has come to an end.

There is something painfully symbolic that Nigel Farage’s embarrassing farewell to the EU should have coincided with a football transfer window. Two cringing betrayals for the price of one.

I have never understood the fascination with the transfer window or the contrived media that it has given rise to. January maybe an exciting time for conniving football agents and emotionally incontinent armchair fans, but for any sane supporter with passion in their heart, it is one of the biggest non-events of our times.

Worse still the transfer window has generated an entirely new form of micro-media, which proudly relies on gossip, misinformation and sheer speculation to over-hype a game that is already teetering on a shaky surface of fantasy economics.

If you think B-list celebrities hidden behind esoteric masks is the nadir of modern television, you have not sat through an hour of Jim White hosting Sky TV’s Deadline Day.

For those are already baffled, let me explain. Football has two transfer windows, a time when players are allowed to negotiate new contracts and change clubs, the longer one is in the summer and the short one is a month in winter.

In England, this short mid-season window is between January 1-31, and as far as Sky is concerned their world revolves around the last “dramatic” 48 hours.

For arcane logistical and bureaucratic reasons, Scotland’s transfer window closes a day later – but you’d barely know that because as soon as the English leagues are dealt with, Sky dismantles its marquee and the circus leaves town.

What is remarkable about transfer window media is that it brazenly abandons any need to verify information. Journalism be hanged, the word “gossip” is proudly paraded as if a drunken assurance overheard in a pub is worthy of being broadcast.

You will already be familiar with the wrapping – Sky employs the entire panoply of 24-hour news operation – breaking news, revolving headlines, and scrolling summaries. It is a brazen conceit – as if a veteran midfielder returning to Port Vale is worthy of the same on-screen rhetoric as war in Afghanistan or engulfing fires in Australia.

Fearful of being left out, newspapers have retaliated with their own panicky versions of deadline day. Poor old print, they seem so petrified of being late to the game, that they litter their columns and digital feeds with scraped speculation for the outer edges of the web.

With varying degrees of portentousness, newspapers try to cling on to the belief that they are publishing a genuine news service – the Telegraph calls its column “Deadline Updates” whilst the Daily Mail prefers “Transfer News Live”. Only the BBC has the common decency to say what’s on the tin. It call its football updates column “Gossip”.

Annually, a perfect storm gathers around deadline day media. With increased cut-backs in journalistic staff and a rush to a “digital-first” web strategy, a vulnerability is regularly exposed.

Some fans have taken to printing patent nonsense on web forums, hoping that the big newspapers will take the bait and repeat their speculation. The Anglo-Spanish defender Juan Kerr has been traded on several occasions. It’s a puerile joke but fans love nothing better than exposing the frailties of the hated “mainstream media” with a double entendre or a surreal absurdity.

The live televised show pioneered by Sky is ripe for satire too. Anchored by the ebullient Jim White, who often draws on the knowledge and contacts of jowly professional footballers. Armed with mobile phones and glib opinions they make urgent calls to “sources” in the game. It is supposed to signify an “in-the-know” mood, but looks like a series of sad calls to the local golf club.

Such is the banal repetitiveness of the show that fans now play Deadline Day bingo, checking off Jim White’s cliches and stock phrases as the go – “The Clock Is Ticking”, “Hold On to Your Hats” and the faux urgency of another Sky favourite, “This One’s Going Right Down to the Wire”.

Former England internationalist Steve Coppell has been one of deadline day’s harshest critics. He claims that the transfer window breeds panic and encourages “scurrilous” transfer activity. “I cannot see the logic in a transfer window. It brings on a fire-sale mentality, causes unrest via the media and means clubs buy too many players,” he once told The Telegraph.

THE transfer window is a by-product of the global movement of players and the near “freelance” contracts that many footballers now work under. The pressure on managers to recruit and the speed with which players move from club-to-club, in many cases from country to country, only adds to the over-exposure.

Player squad sizes are now out of control, youth academies too unwieldy and wages at the top are obscenely out of proportion to the real world.

For all the hype that football attracts, it is abundantly clear that the underlying economics of the professional game are perilously close to financial meltdown. Whilst Scotland is not immune, it is now an open secret that the English Premiership and Championship are carrying more bloated debt than Robert Maxwell’s yacht.

Even though most fans know the economics are unsustainable, they still want their clubs to “make a move” and to gamble money in mid-season. Supporters of my own club, St Johnstone, have spent a week in a state of nervous breakdown because of a perceived lack of action in the transfer market.

The transfer window has the frenzied feel that once gripped the January sales in the days before online shopping. Remember the aggressive jostling at the department store door to get your hand of a flat-screen telly you don’t really

need?

Much of the media that rises up during the transfer window is indicative of the state of the media more widely. In most cases, speed trumps accuracy. It is enough to be first to a speculative story rather than wait for the story to be confirmed.

The internet and social media have become a carcass for feeding frenzies – a single tweet, a throwaway line or a player spotted at an airport can be enough to unlock a story. Verification is no longer required. The fact that the rumour is out in the ether is enough, and so the space for simply concocting stories is now immense.

Complicating an already fragile economy is the globalisation of football. We are now very familiar with players coming to Scotland from Bosnia or from Burkina Faso, a movement of the labour market that allows speculation to multiply. It is now commonplace for agents to place stories listing three clubs that might be theoretically interested in a player, and with a compliant and often desperate media there is precious little need for evidence or corroboration.

Football’s over-blown urgency has already given us one fatal and tragic warning. On January 21 2019, towards the climax of last year’s transfer window, the Argentinean player Emiliano Sala was killed when the private plane carrying him to Cardiff crashed on his way to Cardiff City, after a bitter transfer saga with his French club Nantes. The Piper Malibu private plane carrying Sala went missing over waters near the Channel Islands and it took rescuers two weeks to find the wreckage.

In an emotionally draining eulogy, given by his priest in France where he had played for nearly10 years, it was said the footballer was treated as “a toy” who had little or no control over the direction his career was taking.

It is a wake-up call that football and its salivating media will almost certainly ignore.