By Isaac Massaquoi
The craziest period in the European Football calendar has just ended. It's the period between the conclusion of one league season and the beginning of another. All the excitement is generated by media speculation about which star player is moving from which club to where and for how much money. Football pundits will spend the next few days analysing all the transfers to determine which one is real value for money and which one actually tells us those involved in buying players at such unbelievable fees have more money than sense.
It's also a period of high drama, of joy and disappointment, of trickery and life-changing decisions and, sometimes, outright criminality. The imagery that will remain with me for a long time out of this year's transfer season is the one I haven't stopped laughing about since the news came through on the transfer deadline night 2 September.
Imagine this: a group of men in smart Armani suits wearing fantastic Bulgari perfumes in rented chauffeur-driven limousines arrived at the Spanish Football Association premises claiming to be representatives of Manchester United to negotiate the deal to bring Ander Herrera from Athletic Bilbao over to Old Trafford. They told FA authorities they were ready to meet Bilbao's asking price for the player, something the real Old Trafford people held out against throughout the week leading to this bizarre incident. To the millions of Manchester United supporters around the world, this was a fantastic last minute coup to pull their new manager and their team out of the misery of chasing so many players and failing to land any big name this season.
The British media call them imposters, but are they? To the extent that they went to Madrid without the permission of Manchester United, yes, but I think, and don't take me seriously on this, they were either people looking to do the deal and then get a big cut from the transfer money or they were Manchester United fans who were tired with the paralysis of their chief executive when it came to the business of signing players and were trying to help put the deal through. You can dismiss this without consequence but in the spirit of the transfer season, it's a narrative worth considering.
Arsene Wenger signed a player he doesn't really need. The feel-good factor behind signing a fantastic player like Ozil has played well with the long-suffering fans of Arsenals but with Wiltshire, Ramsey, Carzola and Arteta, it's a crowded midfield and Ozil will not accept any rotation policy that risks his chances of playing for Germany in Brazil 2014. Arsene Wenger is an experienced manager who can handle the situation but there are interesting days ahead.
Another side show to all of this is the way Managers trick their colleagues to steal players from them. My own manager, Jose Mourinho pulled off a deal that left people like me disappointed. He stole the Brazillian, Willian Borges da Silva from the claws of London rivals Tottenham. When the media challenged him he suggested that in future Tottenham should negotiate for players and conduct their medicals in secret. Willian is a great player and I am very happy to have him at Stamford Bridge but I absolutely hate the way Mourinho went about signing in.
My manager was at the centre of another drama of this nature when he fought a bitter and disgraceful battle with Sir Alex Fergusson to sign the Nigerian John Obi Mykel from Lyn Oslo in 2005. Fergusson had actually secured a deal with Lyn for Mykel but the Special One went into the underworld of player transfers and secured the services of the player.
Mykel has done really well since joining Chelsea but his agents' handling of the whole transfer issue left a nasty taste in the mouths of many.
Now, so much for Chelsea, how about the situation surrounding the Uruguayan, Diego Forlan's transfer to Manchester United in 2001? There's information around that Forlan's flight was still airborne when Manchester United did the paperwork on the ground to divert him from another club in the English Premiership that was hoping to secure his signature once he landed in the UK. So there are no angels in this business.
In more recent times, Nigerian international Osaze Odemwinge, so desperate to leave his former club drove from Birmingham to London to present himself as a Queens Park Rangers player only for the team to announce there was no deal. Odemwinge then started the painful process of re-establishing himself at the Hawthorns but the wound of betrayal occasioned by that extremely untidy affair, was too deep for the fans and his manager to take. Had he succeeded, he would have been relegated with QPR to the championship or could have saved them from going down. He has now managed to find a way out of West Bromwich Albion to join newly-promoted Cardiff.
There are two more issues I want to talk about. Let's start with the amount of money involved in transfer deals in England alone. The estimates on deadline day was more than half a billion pounds to move players around from one team to the other. That's an unbelievable amount of money.
Real Madrid spent £83.5 million for the services of Gareth Bale. I honestly think Bale is a great player with a lot of promise. He made all the difference for Tottenham in both domestic football and in the European Champions League. But call me Arsene Wenger, if you like, I will not pay anything more than £30 million for Bale. But Real Madrid are past masters at making such signings so we wish them well. The weight of expectations on the shoulders of the young man is overwhelming and football fans like instant success. If Bale fails to get a goal in his first three matches, the Bernabeu faithful will openly express their feelings from the stands.
Arsene Wenger also spent good money to sign creative attack midfielder, Mesut Ozil. Ozil fits the Arsenal style of play and his signing lifted the spirit of their long-suffering fans. But I have looked at this signing from all sides to determine the reason Wenger spent a club record £42 million on the German. I agree with some renowned pundits, that with his crop of midfielders like Arteta, Ramsey, Carzola and Wiltshire in good shape, Arsenal do not need Ozil. Wenger has just increased pressure on himself in terms of selecting midfielders.
Liverpool have been very crazy in the market. Most of the players they've signed are men for the future and I can understand why Brendan Rodgers is looking forward to going back into the market in January.
Manchester United fans are angry that they signed just one player while raising a false alarm over many others. I think they solved their problem by signing the Belgian giant Marouane Fellaini. They needed a holding midfielder and with his ability to also join in the attack, Fellaini is just the man they needed.
The manager must have angered their most in-form player, Patrice Evra by struggling until the last minute of the transfer deadline to sign another player in that department when they already have Buttner supporting Evra.
I cannot end without talking about the media's role in all this. The media basically create the energy and noise around the transfer business. They are always full of rumours about which player is moving to which team. They have succeeded in breaking a cardinal rule in journalism that talks about checking and verifying all rumours before publishing. In football, rumour is now accepted.
The traditionalists of this trade must be livid that more than 50% of all player movements about which the media speculated, did not happen. Or were never even planned and the media have refused to apologise or even acknowledge they were in unnecessary over-drive.
The media have opened themselves up to be manipulated by greedy football agents who use their platform to spread rumours and outright lies about players being happy or unhappy at certain clubs. Didn't the media help Mourinho steal Willian from Chelsea by creating all that noise around the deal?
The media have packaged and presented players who have ended up as monumental flops on being signed. Manchester United have that experience with the Portuguese boy Bebe and the Cameroonian Eric Djemba Djemba. They also went out to buy a clever Brazilian midfielder only to have Kleberson sold to them. In about two years, they shipped him off to Turkey.
I'm just relieved that whole noise about transfers and signings is over for the next three months at least. So see you in January.
© Politico 05/09/13
