LONDON: And so another deadline day passes. There was the curious three-way exchange of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Oliver Giroud and Michy Batshuayi, an arrangement that called to mind the story that Clark Gable and Cary Grant would meet once a year to exchange unwanted monogrammed gifts.
There was Newcastle’s desperate pursuit of, well, anybody they could persuade to go north-east and there was Manchester City’s failed attempt to land Riyad Mahrez to cover for a brief injury crisis.
There was probably more drama than on any January deadline day for years — and yet there was also a sense that deadline day used to be better than this; as though, like all holidays, they were better in our youth.
The demand is always for a bigger and bigger hit, and constantly we remember the glories of the past — Andy Carroll to Liverpool, Fernando Torres to Chelsea, what days they were when £50 million ($71 million) meant something — in a nostalgic light.
It is a form of collective delusion, the widespread buy-in a part of the football-industrial complex that has created an entire super-structure around the game that generates revenue and suits everybody apart from the game itself. Players get to negotiate a new deal and take a signing-on fee. Agents take a major cut. Managers can rejig a squad by buying off-the-shelf talent rather than trying to develop players themselves — and are given the excuse of being always two or three players short of a side that could actually do something.
Chief executives and clubs love it because they can either generate revenue or generate new marketing opportunities, the importance of that latter issue demonstrated by the complexity and sophistication of the many short videos welcoming players to their new clubs.
Fans love transfers because each purchase is an injection of new hope. It takes only the quickest scan of social media to see the gusto with which Arsenal fans have greeted Aubameyang or Manchester United fans Alexis Sanchez or Liverpool fans Virgil van Dijk, welcoming them as if they would magically solve every problem their teams have had. In the hours immediately after a player signs he exists as pure potential, unsullied by any errors or loss of form.
That perhaps helps explain why some fans seem to enjoy transfers more than the actual game, why they will doggedly pursue online vendettas against pundits who express the slightest doubt that their new toy will magically transform their team, or dare to suggest that a player who has just left their club might not actually be completely hopeless.
And journalists love transfers because it gives us something to talk about and generates debate, conversation and traffic. This spew of opinion, this white noise of prediction — this, apparently, is what drives revenue in the modern era.
The numbers soar to unimaginable levels. The comparisons become increasingly alarming: Alexis Sanchez’s reported weekly wage would fund 27 nurses for a year. What that says about the priorities of society is dispiriting, and yet it is probably better that it goes to the players than anybody else in the game. And nobody, it seems, ever stops to wonder whether all this is necessary.
No manager is ever allowed to work through a bad spell. Once a slide starts, a sacking follows, almost no matter what he has done before. If Claudio Ranieri (pictured), having memorably led Leicester to the title two years ago, did not have enough credit in the bank to see out a difficult couple of months the following season, then nobody does. New managers mean new players, but players too are subject to the same impatience, the same churn of rejection and renewal. Alex Ferguson blamed reality TV and the format of voting somebody out each week. That pervades all culture now.
Yet the counter-examples are there. Burnley kept Sean Dyche when they were relegated in 2015 and came back stronger with a manager who had learned from the experience. Athletic Bilbao have still never been relegated from La Liga despite recruiting only Basques and those from the local area. It can be done: Not everything is about money.
It feels old-fashioned to say it in the modern world, but there are times when you wonder whether coaches might not actually like to try doing some coaching.