How Transfer News Will Kill Us All – A Plea To Sanity
By Zahir Gilani
Are you a Chelsea FC fan? Have you heard of a guy named Arda Turan? If you hadn’t before last week I’m quite positive you have now.
How about Manchester City and Manchester United? Have you been biting your fingernails in anticipation of blockbuster moves for Paul Pogba, Raheem Sterling, Gareth Bale and Sergio Ramos.
Are you worried that FC Barcelona and Bayern Munich will beat you to their signatures?
Have you been reading various versions of the same transfer news reports from faceless sources on countless websites stating that, to your jubilation, the player you so covet will be joining your team and thereby propelling you to glory, only to have a contrary report emerge an hour later, from another anonymous source, on another random website, saying that your most prized acquisition is in fact not signing for your team after all but instead breaking the space time continuum and signing for your three most hated rivals simultaneously?
In an attempt to appeal to your common sense, surely you can see how ridiculous this all is. Transfer rumors do not deal in facts, they only traffic in one commodity – Hope!
And it works. I hate transfer rumors for this reason. I am being trafficked hope by those who in reality know very little and are capitalizing on the need we all have as fans for hope; hope that our team will become better and our rivals won’t improve.
Because football is the world’s most popular game there is an endless demand for story and exaggerated narratives about the state of everything at all times. If De Gea leaves Man United their title chances dwindle. If United get Bale, Varane and Ramos in exchange they are instant contenders…and similar narratives will be created for every team as the days and weeks pass.
Another by product of this endless demand for content are pointless “Who is” and “How will” write ups, where someone who knows just as little as the rest of us tells you all about a player who they them self have probably never watched or even heard of up until a couple days ago. More than likely they are just going off a wikipedia page, combined with another article that they read on another site. There may even be an embedded youtube video containing grainy footage, from somewhere in the obscurity of Bolivia or Equatorial Guinea’s 2nd division, of this sure fire phenom mystery wonderkid dribbling through players you will never see or hear from again.
Furthermore that will spawn the how will player X fit in at your team write up, again a subject that no one truly knows for certain, not even experts who are on TV and get paid big salaries.
All of this is hope trafficking and it comes with a price…
Where will Raheem Sterling and Paul Pogba end up? Surely whichever big teams land them will pay an enormous fee and the fans will have reason to rejoice.
Suppose big teams like Liverpool and Juventus lose their best players to even bigger teams – financially speaking. We’re heading towards a world of football that is an oligopoly dominated by the chosen few. If you look at the Champions League competition there are only 5 clubs, give or take, that can realistically win it every year. Even the occasion outliers like Borussia Dortmund and Atletico Madrid fall short, and if giant clubs become worse to make behemoth clubs even better do you really want that of the game you love?
Wherever you are in the world we all have relatively similar access to information, and yet we still know very little. I am a Chelsea fan in Toronto, Canada. Speaking with my teenage cousin, a Real Madrid fan who is visiting from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he tried to convince me that Arturo Vidal had agreed to join the Galacticos. I tried to convince him that this was not true. We went to google and the first thing that came up was a story about him in talks to sign with Arsenal. I assured him that soon he’d read that Vidal was looking to buy a home in London and then a Madrid, and then Shanghai. They’ll just keep making up stories because we will keep clicking on them.
Happy with my work, my cousin left the room. Then I checked to see if Arda Turan had signed for my club yet…Damn it all, he went to Barcelona.