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How Sky Sports spent millions to save Deadline Day

Few people realise that Sky Sports spend an enormous amount of time and money on making sure they are ready for transfer deadline. Beyond the hysterical coverage over the course of the day, millions of man-hours and millions of pounds are committed to making sure that they hit the ground running, and then reach full sprint pace after about seven hours.

It isn’t a waste of time and effort by any means. It is now a universally acknowledged truth that transfers are more important than the football that happens on the pitch. Richard Scudamore has, under the radar, proposed to reform the Premier League in a way which would suit a new system. Competitive matches would be abolished, and the top four would tour the world to take on various teams in friendlies, allowing the world to gawp at and appreciate the new signings made on a six-monthly basis. This lack of intensity would help keep players fit and able to perform week in, week out, and make for more time for sponsorship performances. Indeed, Wayne Rooney has been using this template for the past two years as a trial to see if it works. With his awful standards but incredible commercial prowess, it has been considered an unrivalled success.

Sky are happy to accommodate such a move, as it ramps up the focus on the transfer period, and increases even further the attention to the deals made and the money spent. This transfer window is a trial run for yet more hyperbole, and we can see the ways in which they’ve prepared for the event.

Jim White’s USB port

White has given his body over to science for the last three years in order to maximise his talents. When off-screen, he is encased in an extreme crychamber. Some atheletes use ice baths in order to reduce inflammation and decrease recovery time, but White goes further than those mere amateurs. White steps into an adapted tanning machine, and his core body temperature is brought down to around minus 68 degrees centigrade. This stops the ageing and decaying process of mind and body, which has obvious advantages. When released and thawed, he has the energy to plow on through literally several hours of on-screen time at peak performance, without the dip that other competitors might experience and attempt to combat with flapjacks.

However, while this system has worked in the past, it has forced White to cram the latest rumours and news in the short time before he appears on screen, and in commercial breaks. Sky have combatted this by making White the first fully functioning cyborg, by fitting him with a usb port on the small of his back. As a result, while in a deep sleep, his brain can be fed the latest stories from Twitter and Sky’s own faultless and extensive sources. When refreshed, he comes awake fully updated.

Cost £11,000,000.

Scientific research into the psychological effects of the colour yellow

A source says: “Every year, a couple of hours after the end of deadline day, things would calm down. Heartbeats would return to normal and we’d focus on the international break coming ahead. Then, we’d get these weird emotions creeping up to us. Shame, embarrassment, self-loathing. Sometimes we’d weep. Not heavily, but just a constant trickle of morose ennui. And we didn’t know why. We’d just spent the best part of three weeks preparing for a day when literally tens of football players would move club, but we’d feel miserable afterwards. It was that point we realised - the colour yellow must have been causing our upset. We decided to see what the biological reasoning was that and commissioned several boffins to examine it.”

Cost: £200,000

Creating an artificial boom in the sex aid industry

We all remember where we were when Kennedy was shot. We all remember where we were when the Iraq war started. And we all remember where we were when Alan Irwin had a dildo shoved in his ear. Of course, the latter was the most emotional of the three events. It desecrated a sacred time that united the country, and it wiped 30% of the FTSE futures before calm was restored to the country after a three-hour COBRA meeting. It was perhaps the worst night that many of us have ever experienced.

It was, if you can imagine, even worse for Sky Sports. They thought that - far worse than financial crisis - this could be the end of a live-broadcast Deadline Day event. In future, changes were made. The move to bring reporters inside training grounds and stadiums, and away from the length-wielding rabble, was a success, with zero incidents of dildo assault since the change.

Sadly, that peace in our time was once again put at risk, as internet chatter suggested a grave, vile conspiracy. ISIS had teamed up with the LAD Bible to use drone technology to launch wave after wave after wave at innocent sports reporters across the country. With only a few weeks before Deadline Day, Sky sprang into action with a brilliant piece of lateral thinking. While they initially considered employing mercenaries to extra-judicially execute those planning the attack, they realised that this was logistically impossible and legally ambiguous. Instead, they diverted several million pounds into buying every single dildo in the country, and those in the EU, to prevent any successful orders. Going by the morning’s events, it’s been an enormous success.

Cost: £6,000,000,000