A MERE PAWN IN THE WARS TO COME
Declan Rice, Jack Grealish, Ben White, Yves Bissouma all touted around like Oliver Twist on X Factor in a shop window in Amsterdam. Roll up, roll up, you've been plucked from obscurity to be judged by the baying mass. 'Do a little dance for us, that's it, show us your highlights reel' 'how much is he worth? 50 million?' 'no chance, 75 million?' 'they wouldn't pay that for him' ‘he’s exactly what we need’. How lucky you are, Football Twitter and some feckless pundit have decided ‘it could be you!’.
Transfer window time approaches and these excretions of hot ripe air intensify. The cycle becomes self-fulfilling: if one 'pundit' deems it so, the rest get a whiff of the brown stink and cock their leg to add to the guff, it reverberates around and eventually finds it's way to the established media who parp out the same line BUT this time it appears with a photoshop of the player in the shirt of the destination club, ooo nice, some air of legitimacy added to this. Those who did the crime get a recycled whiff of their own brand, lovely, ‘told you so’ they say - now it's a universal truth, an inevitably we’re all powerless in the face of.
The cycle is the same for every club and always relative to league standing. Brighton fans, for example, will do it to Brentford players, who's fans have in turn done it to Peterborough players and so on. However, the place where the stink is most pungent, is amongst fans and of unsuccessful but rich premier league team (regular scum like you or me or fans regularly employed by media organisations). Low on trophies, highly bored by their annual Europa League semi-final defeat to Benfica - usually rolling around on Twitter or in BT sport studios - they look to buying players as a kind of micro-competition, a competition they can actually win, achieving a modicum of success and the satisfaction of getting one over on their fellow unsuccessful but rich rivals. Of course, these fans will help you to believe, their clubs can pick who they want, pluck them from obscurity, the player and their current employer helpless to the pull of 12 more points and slightly less chance of losing to City next season.
The player and the selling club are merely a pawn in wars to come: the fight for fourth, the Europa League quarter final second league away defeat at Slavia Prague - the stuff that really matters. The lifecycle of one of these lucky few players laid out before them: over the top hype, crashing realism, inevitable disappointment, and subsequent loan move to Newcastle, all commented on by such esteemed critiques such as @neymarisgod808 – twice banned from Twitter, never actually been to the Emirates. Write a cheque, name your price, it’s a fait accompli.
The reality is that all this theoretical horse trading, is completely meaningless, of course. Highly organised, meticulously managed multibillion dollar companies would not operate like this. 'Well some clubs are being rumoured to be looking at him Geoff’ of course they are! Do you really think that modern scouting networks do not cover all players all the time, especially ones in the same farting league? This seems obvious to suggest, but Football Twitter and pundits need to hear it, louder, from the back and cease their patronising and arrogant guff.
The ‘player’ or the organisation behind them makes up the name - agent, media agencies that look after them are complicity in pimping their asset and wafting the flame. It never hurts, making the right noises indicating an approach might be welcome, or at the very least helps with negotiations with excising clubs on new contracts. See Wilfred Zaha’s career.
Declan Rice, Jack Grealish, Ben White, Yves Bissouma or anyone else might well be sold, but it won’t be because of the swirl of stink surrounding their highlights reels on twitter or a comment made in the 70th minute of a Monday night 0-0 when Alan Smith has run out of cliches. It’ll be down to money, intent (to buy and sell) the wishes of the player, months or years of profiling and scouting and not whether @neymarisgod808 (sorry to have a go at you again mate) thinks Emi Beundia is good enough to play for Tottenham or not.
As the Premier League has become richer, clubs who finish 17th can afford wages once previously only affordable by a certain few, the prospect of the move become less attractive, see players such as Lewis Dunk who have chosen to become highly paid, club legends, doggedly fitting for the club that made them, relegation would be the only threat to that. The reality is, which hurts fans of the unsuccessful but rich clubs, is that Aston Villa to Tottenham for example, isn’t the step up it once was.
The arrogance from fans and pundits that believes that ‘lesser’ players and clubs are the playthings of the super-rich is a mildly annoyingly symptom or the increasingly inverted football pyramid - top heavy and creaking under the weight of its own hubris.