Reality out the window once transfer season reaches fever pitch

Date Published: {J}

It’s a strange phrase for a start – the transfer window – when really a big door into a bank vault would be a better analogy in keeping with the spirit of this part of the football season.

Loyalty comes in the form of a large signing-on fee – coupled in many cases by an equally impressive signing-off fee from the club wishing to get the player off their books – and the pampered star’s delight at the new challenge is really more to do with finding a mock-Tudor mansion with a swimming pool that finding the back of the net.

Sky Sports lives for this moment – particularly the last day before this infamous transfer window closes and they count down the seconds as though they are preparing for lift-off from Cape Canaveral.

Officially, players never leave for the money; it’s the homesickness, the lack of first team opportunities, the chance to play for the manager/fans/club they’ve always loved, the chance to fulfil a boyhood ambition, the weather, the international colleagues already on the same gravy train at their new club – there are many reasons but you’ll never hear a mention of money.

And yet it’s at the heart of everything going on across the water this week – guys like our old friend ‘Cashley’ Cole who was insulted with Arsenal ‘only’ offered him £55,000 a week to stay with his boyhood club while Chelsea waited in the wings with a £90,000 a week offer.

Did Owen Coyle leave upwardly mobile Burnley for relegation threatened Bolton because the challenge at Turf Moor wasn’t what he needed after all? Did he heck.

The end result of all this is the sort of insipid performance turned in by Liverpool last week when a team of highly paid egomaniacs looked as interested in the FA Cup as a snowman would be in a patio heater.

Reading, a team struggling to stay in the Championship, deservedly dumped them out of the competition which in other seasons might not represent a ripple of discomfort at a Premier club but in Liverpool’s case means their last chance of domestic success was gone two weeks into the new year.

Did heads roll as a result? Were hands held up to acknowledge that this wouldn’t have been acceptable from an U12 schoolboy selection, never mind fellas on an average of £70,000 a week?

If an ordinary worker turned in a day like this in the office, they’d be lectured, suspended if it continued to happen and eventually fired. These boys aren’t even docked money.

The only Liverpudlian left on the field to the finish – Jamie Carragher – was equally the only one who looked like it mattere. But then Carra has never looked for the big move away from his home town club, never angled for the big signing on fee, never kissed any badge other than the liver bird.

That’s a rare accomp

lishment at a club which once prided itself on loyalty, where players aspired to play and, if they were lucky enough to achieve that, they stayed as long as they had a contribution to make.

Back in the day, you could name the starting eleven quicker than you’d know your prayers – Clemence, Callaghan, Heighway, Hughes, Smith, Keegan, Toshack – and most of them spent their golden days at Anfield.

They didn’t sell posters – or replica kits for that matter – back then, but if you did pin a picture of a Liverpool player to your bedroom wall, you could be reasonably sure it would stay there until the Sellotape ran out of stickiness.

These days, buying football posters or replica kits for the young football fans in your house can be a hazardous pursuits – we have two lads who are pointed at in the streets when they wear their ‘Keane, 7’ grey Liverpool away strip that our Robbie might have modelled once or twice on the Anfield bench before he headed back to White Hart Lane.

The Irish captain has this transfer business down to a fine art; he left Wolves for Coventry for £6 million; Coventry to Inter Milan for £13 million a year later; Inter to Leeds for £12 million another twelve months later; Leeds to Spurs for £7 million; Spurs to Liverpool for £20.3 million and – even though it wasn’t his idea – back to White Hart Lane a few months later for a basic £12 million with another £4 million in potential add ons.

That means Robbie has racked up almost £75 million in transfer fees over a ten year period – which, if he got his basic seven and a half per cent cut, would amount to almost £6 million into his wallet. In reality, he earned a multiple of that in bizarrely named loyalty bonuses and signing on fees so that his best work was arguably done in

the boardroom as opposed to on the pitch.

The boy from Tallaght is still only trotting behind Chelsea striker Nicolas Anelka whose transfer fees have totalled £85 million, taking him from Arsenal to Real Madrid to Paris Saint-Germain to Manchester City to Fenerbahce, Bolton and finally to Chelsea.

The greed, of course, extends to the boardroom and while Liverpool and Manchester United are the most obvious examples of owners buying a club and loading it with their debt, the Premiership will see one of its members go to the wall before the season is out.

West Ham are in the last chance saloon, Portsmouth are outside hanging round the car park without the price of a pint, and a half a dozen others are in serious financial trouble.

Sky can take the blame for some of this, waving their wads of television cash in clubs’ faces, but they didn’t force them to spend it so profligately.

The only thing ruining football is pure self-serving greed and it will destroy everything in its wake if wages aren’t capped, if clubs aren’t limited to a spend that’s proportionate to its actual income – not that of its Sugar Daddy – and if fans, as opposed to Richard Keys or Andy Gray, aren’t restored to their rightful place at the heart of the game.

But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

For more, read page 13 of this week’s Connacht Tribune.