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Talking Football: The Transfer Circus is over - for a few months at least

So long, farewell. Auf Wiedersehen, goodnight.

It wasn’t only Bundesliga clubs who were thankful that the transfer window had closed. They didn’t want more of their best laid pre-season plans being interrupted by another nouveau riche Premier League club, any more than Ligue 1 clubs in France - though the transfer fees prompted much hilarity in Europe.

The last days of the transfer window were again unedifying, a circus encouraged by fans who can’t get enough of football transfers and a media who know stories about transfers get far, far more hits than any other. Particularly if they involve a big club, and specifically if that club is Manchester United.

I recently spoke to a national newspaper journalist who’d written a ‘normal’ transfer story about United, one where they were in for a player which every newspaper was reporting. It had 55,000 hits. On the same day, he attended a press conference with Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini and wrote that up as a story. It got 750 hits.

The obsession with transfers is nothing new. Football fans of any generation at any club can recall their excitement when a new player signed, but social media has spun it out into an unholy mess of bias, resentment and anger. It’s as if some fans would rather their team stopped playing football matches and instead focused entirely on the buying and selling of players.

There are fans who’d rather receive a bit of intelligence about who their team might be signing above seeing a goal from a player who’ve they’ve actually signed.

Decent journalists are vilified for reporting facts as they are that day, though the same reporters would rarely tweet their findings directly onto Twitter. Why would they spend a day making calls and getting a story only to give the information away?

Yet there are plenty of phoney individuals, who’ve amassed tens of thousands of followers but who’ve never been seen at a game or in a press box, passing on supposedly credible information when they have none.

There are skimmers waiting to translate the foreign press every night, even more wannabe agents since de-regulation, wind up merchants and blaggers.

Fans often react badly if they don’t like what they read. “Where are the quotes?” they’ll ask a journalist. “Typical lazy journalism!”

What are they expecting? David de Gea to say “While I’m a contracted player for Manchester United, I sincerely hope that my current employers sell me to Real Madrid as soon as possible?”

Manchester United to say: “We do want Pedro but we’re biding our time and stringing him along because we want Gareth Bale more. And we’ll look even more foolish than we already do when we failed to sign more of the superstars we go for.”

The agent to say: “I’ve offered my client to 19 clubs and the one who pays me the most commission via a subsidiary company in the Cayman Islands will get him.”

Transfers are complex, they break down, they mutate and change. But the farce the transfer window has become is not entirely a new phenomenon.

A speculative call about Denis Irwin led to Eric Cantona moving from Leeds United to Manchester United.

Roy Keane was going to sign for Blackburn Rovers and any reporter reporting that would have been accurate. Then Sir Alex Ferguson intervened, inviting the Irishman for game of snooker at his home, where he let Keane win as part of a successful seduction attempt to induce him to sign.

Transfers go through or fail for a number of reasons. I spoke to one Spanish player last season who was about to sign for a major Greek club on a wage twice what he’d been on in La Liga.

The club president had personally shown him and his wife around Athens, showed them areas where they could live. All the terms had been agreed and the player was really up for the move and playing Champions League football.

The media had been briefed; the agent was satisfied with everything. The green lights were all on - and yet as they sat in the room to sign the contract, the player’s wife started crying. A lot. The player asked for a few minutes to speak to his wife.

The agent told him to sign before talking with her. The wife said, ‘No!’ and told her man that she didn’t want to move to Greece, that she didn’t want to leave Spain. The deal fell through and he signed for a club in Spain on a quarter of what he’d been offered. Guess where they moved to a year later? That quaint Spanish pueblo, Abu Dhabi.

I spoke to the wife of a British player last week. Not unreasonably, she wanted to know where her family would be living in two weeks’ time. Her children were in school and were about to start back, her husband’s future was uncertain. She watched fans happily discarding him online, moving him out of the way with like an unwanted chess piece.

“Would it not just be better to sort all this out before the season started?” she asked.

As Paul Heaton sang, they could have been sent to Rotterdam or anywhere, Liverpool or Rome. Players do have a choice, but they can be coerced into thinking they don’t and pressured into leaving by the threat of being told to train with the kids and having the key part of their livelihood – playing football – taken away.

At the heart of the transfer window are real people whose futures are decided largely by others. They’re not serfs and they’ve often very wealthy, but there must be a better way than allowing so much disruption once the season has started.

That said, players like a transfer window or two. I surveyed dozens earlier in the year about the transfer window. As one League One player said: “It’s good if you need a move mid-season from a bad manager who doesn’t like you. And I speak from experience.”

Another said: “If players could move at any time it would be chaos.” Another: “It should stop at the start of the season.” But whose season? Football is global now and the start of the English season is mid-season in South America, a continent now regularly mined for talent.

Coaches don’t like the transfer window when they’re trying to keep hold of players, but they do like them when they’ve played four games and realise that their goalscorer isn’t firing and they still have time to do something about it, as Manchester United did it with their Martial Plan to sign a young Monaco forward.

The fee for Anthony Martial invoked ridicule, but it’s not his fault and United are adamant that the top fee for a player will be £200 million within a few years. But United should be once bitten twice shy about the success of big money, last-minute transfers after Radamel Falcao and Angel di Maria last season.

The transfer window unsettles dressing rooms because players don’t know, literally, whether they’re coming or going. They don’t know whether team-mates they’ve become friends with and built up a good understanding with on and off the pitch will be there next week, but will there ever be a perfect solution?