GOD bless Jim White and his garish yellow tie. If Sky Sports’ coverage of deadline day wasn’t so slick and hypnotic maybe we wouldn’t forget what an empty festival of excess and vanity the whole thing is. We might as well be spending 24 hours in front of the telly watching Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour swapping yachts.
At some point soon, if they haven’t done already, the numbers involved will lose all meaning to the ordinary man or woman. Like the received wisdom that the £80m United lavished on Paul Pogba ‘now seems like a bargain’. Or the fact that Alexis Sanchez’s arrangement with Manchester United will see him pick up £500,000-a-week, money which could bankroll most Ladbrokes Premiership sides for a season. Or alternatively make a fairly decent dent into child poverty in the local area.
Or how about the fact Manchester City, already coasting away with the English top-flight title, shrewdly opted out of offering Sanchez those terms, and instead simply broke their transfer record once by spending £57m on Aymeric Laporte and were reportedly close to doing so again at £95m for Riyad Mahrez. That would represent a fair old mark up on a man Leicester City signed for £350,000-odd from Le Havre.
In these times of austerity, why should anyone care whether multi-millionaires like Henrikh Mikhtarian or Olivier Giroud have swapped badges at the drop of a hat, increasing their investment portfolios in the process, as twenty million pounds, the kind of sum once lavished only on five-star talent, suddenly becomes the going rate for the jobbing Premier League player.
They are worth that, so the logic goes, because somebody was prepared to pay it. While all this wage and transfer inflation is decidedly bad news for Scottish football - our big clubs cannot afford to compete, and our smaller sides now populate their teams with reserve players from English teams ahead of our own kids - just occasionally there is a crumb off the table.
While Celtic are revelling in their sell-on fee for Virgil van Dijk, precisely the same logic comes into play when you look at the sums of up to £8m reportedly being offered to Rangers from Chinese outfit Beijing Renhe for Alfredo Morelos. Incidentally, with the Chinese window still open for a number of weeks, even the transfer window closing last night won’t be the end of that affair. Surely, if Fifa were serious about doing something about regulating the transfer market, it would be an idea to start standardising the windows?
As depressing as the Great British pastime of worshipping transfer deadline day in all its yellow glory can seem, thankfully not everyone is determined to take it at face value. Instead, like many social phenomena, there is the beginnings of a counter culture here, a sense of the carnivalesque. There are deadline day parties to be hosted and deadline day bingo or drinking games to be played. Generally anything treating the thing with the derision it deserves is fine with me.
These people revel in moments like Peter Odemwingie appearing in the QPR car park, a group of rowdy onlookers at Stoke City larking around with a comedy phallus or Harry Redknapp winding down his windscreen to tell us nothing is happening just seconds before Rafael van der Vaart rocks up.
A strangely British affair – Sky attempted recently to transplant it to Italy with mixed results –there are rules to prevent this kind of thing in US Sport. In Super Bowl week, it occurs to me that football in Europe could never operate a draft system for recruiting young players because quite simply the big clubs who have no interest in creating the level playground you see in the NFL, where a joke team like the Jacksonville Jaguars can turn themselves around with a series of judicious first round draft picks. European football has no time for democracy, it is a hierarchy of haves and have nots. And with Paris St Germain and Manchester City changing the rules of the game, even that other staple of US Sport, the salary cap, has no place in it. Financial fair play rules or not, it is too late to bolt the door: a lot of football players and agents are going to get an awful lot richer before Jim White hangs up that yellow tie.
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