With the news today that 12,500 people have signed Sky Sports’ online petition to make transfer deadline day a national holiday (*sigh*), Greg Evans examines the very moment it all went horribly wrong for everybody…
“HONK honk honk honk HONK HONK honk HONK!!!”
Since the dawn of time, the fine sport of football has always enjoyed a good transfer. Whether it be a mega-bucks barnstormer of a deal (see Gareth Bale, Cristiano Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane and the like) or a controversial move to the dark side (Sol Campbell, Paul Ince, Luis Figo, etc), a major player switching clubs will always generate debate and, more importantly, headlines and precious, precious clicks.
Although obviously a key and exciting part of the game, transfers and the hype surrounding them have taken on a whole new life-form in recent years. This is partially down to the transfer window.
Of course, while transfer rumours continue to circulate endlessly these days, the fact that any and all signings must be made during the same four months of every year means that manic speculation runs especially rife around about those brief periods.
Before the transfer window was brought in, players could be signed at any time during the course of the season, meaning clubs could address their problems and bring in new recruits as and when they deemed appropriate. In fact, upon its introduction in 2002, the premise didn’t seem too ludicrous – a simple way to ring-fence all the toing and froing.
The biggest transfer of that summer’s window was Rio Ferdinand moving from Leeds to Manchester United for £30million – a deal which was practically already wrapped up following the conclusion of that summer’s World Cup.
That suit, lest we forget
Following Rio’s move to Old Trafford, the whole process seemed to be ticking along quite nicely – that was right up until a little Brazilian known simply as Robinho shocked the system in 2008, when on transfer deadline day he opted for Manchester City over Chelsea at seemingly the 11th hour (Chelsea even had his shirt on sale!) despite not appearing to know who or what a “Manchester City” was.
As over-priced and overrated as he latterly proved to be, Robinho’s dramatic arrival on these shores had, in its own small way, unwittingly changed the football media landscape in England forever.
If you choose to see it as such, that one transfer may have been the tipping point – the sole reason that we now live in a world crammed to the gills with bullshit headlines and Jim White’s rabid face and deafening, delirious drivel – but, as Yoda once mumbled, there is…another.
I give you 31st January, 2011: the day the entire football world descended into utter chaos and frothing lunacy, of which the aftershock is still being felt to this day.
The day started off pretty ordinarily for a deadline day, with Tottenham being linked with a series of players that they could neither realistically afford or attract. Nothing much has changed on that front.
However, there was also a spicy little rumour brewing, concocted the night before, that Fernando Torres was preparing to do the unthinkable and swap Anfield for Stamford Bridge.
It’s almost impossible to tell who got the rawer deal
With future legend Luis Suarez arriving at Liverpool from Ajax that very day, it made perfect sense for El Nino to move on and that Kenny Dalglish (the then-Liverpool boss) would in turn want to strengthen his depleted front-line having pinpointed – in his infinite wisdom – young Geordie giant Andy Carroll as the ideal partner for his shiny new Suarez.
As the day ticked on, speculation about these interlinked deals grew and grew and so did the mooted fees.
Chelsea were said to be offering around £50million for Torres, an astronomical price for an already-on-the-wane striker who wasn’t exactly on song.
With cartoon pound signs lighting up in his eyes, Dalglish slammed a £35million wodge onto Newcastle’s table to which they presumably replied ‘ta, very much, like’ in their native tongue while struggling not to burst into spontaneous song.
With stupendous figures like that being bandied around, negotiations ran right until the final few minutes of the window – creating mass hysteria in the media and giving Jim White the biggest under-desk erection he had ever nursed in his life.
Jim White, pictured shortly after midnight, 31st Jan 2011
At around 11pm, both respective transfers were confirmed by the rival Premier League clubs, as were the arrivals of Señor Suarez at Liverpool and David Luiz at Chelsea (the fact a man of Luiz’s elite buffoonery was involved in this window should have served as an omen for the calamity still to come).
Torres’ transfer smashed the British transfer fee record at an eye-watering £50million (only recently surpassed by Angel Di Maria) and Carroll’s move to Merseyside made him the most expensive English player of all time despite…y’know…the obvious.
Those two respective transfers, for a long time, looked to have ruined the careers of both men. It took Torres close to three months to score his first goal for the Blues, which proved to be his only goal for the remainder of that season.
Fernando Torres, in full “sad cloud” mode
Carroll, on the other hand, didn’t make his Liverpool debut until 6th March thanks to an injury sustained whilst still at Newcastle (Dear Kenny, why would you sign an injured player for so much money?).
Having scored 11 goals for Toon in the first half of the season, it took Carroll until mid-April to grab his first goals for Liverpool in a 3-0 victory over Man City, before going on to make just nine appearances for the club in his first half-season at Anfield before knee injuries blighted his second.
Neither player settled properly (despite Torres hanging round at Chelsea for almost four years) and bar a brief scattering of highlights, both have since moved on to pastures new in desperate need of rebuilding their reputations.
Whatever factors caused both players’ failure to launch at their former clubs remains ambiguous but the mind-blowing ridiculousness of that fateful deadline day surely cannot have helped. Expectations immediately rise when that sort of money is thrown into the equation and unfortunately for both Torres and Carroll, neither man could live down their exorbitant fees.
Cheer up son, there’s always next month
The fact that that day unfolded as it did means that we football fans have to exist in our current stupor. With the innate unpredictability of deadline day, broadcasters (*cough* Sky Sports News *cough*) are given free reign to exponentially hype the signing of a name on a piece of paper like it were the release of a blockbuster movie.
Frumpy old reality is a mere dot in the rear-view mirror.
It has also created an air of feverishly escalating chaos two days a year: an intoxicating circus that sees young players like Luke Shaw and Danny Welbeck treated as new messiahs and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, confused souls like Peter Odemwingie turning up in the Loftus Road car park wondering why all the lights are off and the doors are locked.
Whipped into a frenzy, people are also seizing their chance to do this kind of thing too…
Crystal Palace fans hijack Deadline Day to aggressively protest Sky Sports’ monopolisation of football, forcing reporter Kaveh Solhekol to flee the area
Transfers will always be a part of football (such is capitalism) but the transfer window and the Deadline Day™ spectacle are slowly sucking the soul out of the game. It causes fans to go ballistic when their clubs haven’t recruited anyone and allows them to air unnecessary grievances in increasingly self-entitled fashion (see above).
Perhaps more unforgivably, motor-mouth hacks like Jim White and Harry Redknapp are kept relevant by its sheer existence and so are the hordes of hopeless reporters who are forced to stand outside training grounds and have sex toys plunged into their orifices by feckless fans.
Clubs and managers are continually complaining about the perils of deadline day, an increasing number of fans are starting to tire of the shenanigans and even Sky Sports, the ringmasters themselves, have now taken steps to ensure fans won’t be able to swarm their reporters any more.
Surely the nonsense must end before it reaches terminally velocity (or should that be volume?).
Modern football has so many cancerous sores, but it’s the transfer window that oozes the most foul-smelling discharge.
Greg (@gregzeene) is a freelance football scribe who has contributed to Pies many times in the past. He also mans the cracking Goals on Films podcast.