During the summer months when there is very little competitive football to keep football fans pre-occupied, the focus turns to transfers and who your club may be signing or selling before the new season starts. Every pre-season, football fans across the country have a fresh optimism for the campaign, whatever happened last year is in the past.
The obsession with transfers, especially over the summer months, is just part of the game and has always existed but the changing of the way we received our news has increased its exposure as a big transfer story could sell many more papers for a newspaper or get a huge number of hits on a website like this.
I am probably not the only person who checks the BBC and Sky Sports gossip pages everyday to see what the newspapers are reporting. I can’t explain why but rumours are highly addictive and the media outlets know this so like to feed our addiction with as many rumours and transfer stories as possible.
Football has always been about having about having an opinion and every football fan thinks they know what their manager should do and who they should sign, probably encouraged by games like Football Manager and Championship Manager. This knowledge fuels forums and debates about their particular club and who they want them to sign.
With the summer transfer window only open until the end of August, it makes the speculation more intense during the quiet months but even when the window is shut there is still transfer talk in newspapers and online so maybe we should just accept this as part of the ever changing game.
However, the Bosman ruling has definitely increased this obsession with transfers as now player contracts appear to be meaningless. This means agents are keen to manufacture a move for their clients in order to take a slice of a transfer fee, even if they are still under contract. If these contracts were made permanent, as they were before the ruling, surely this would reduce the number of players moving. How many of the stories that you read in the papers and online every day are artificial and have been made up by agents trying to attract attention to their client?
The transfer market is now an off-season league where media outlets score points by breaking news with headlines and column inches. The many rolling news channels, websites and newspapers that all compete to get the biggest stories have led to the buying and selling of players taking much more importance than it used to.
Another factor in the increase is the pressure on managers who know if they make a few bad signings the axe could fall on their reign. This has been the case in recent years at Chelsea although however it doesn’t help when the manager didn’t want to bring the player into the club like Torres. This pressure results in even more new signings as they try their best to please the ruthless owners and achieve success on the pitch.
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The football management games we spend hours playing now appear to becoming a reality with clubs having billionaire owners who want to bring in as many big money names as possible to satisfy their personal egos. That doesn’t mean the supporters are complaining and they seem to enjoy these fantasy sort-of transfers that arrive at their club.
It is not an obsession, more of a love of the game which has always existed and it is just the mediums through which this is portrayed that have been developed. It used to be discussed on the terraces, in the bars and in the clubs but now it has moved to the new online media along with the demand for 24 hour news and the continued existence of national and local newspapers.
There has been talk that scrapping the transfer window would end this obsession but I don’t think it would that change much. The demand for transfers would still be there as it always has been, all that has changed recently is the way we receive our news. Transfers are just one part of the beautiful game but we have to remember that money and transfers do not even compared to goals and action on the pitch, the way it should remain.
However this obsession will be here again this time next year as what else are we going to talk about when there is no football??
Let me know your thoughts and follow me on twitter @aidanmccartney for more football (and transfer) chat
