By Tony Attwood
So now it is all over, at least in terms of winning the world cup, and things can start to look a bit less chaotic. Although in fact much of the chaos is just the next story manufactured to keep up our interest between the end of the WC and the start of the new season.
In short, much of what you will read and hear from now on, is made up. So some players move around, we are invited to forget about the WC and get ready for yet another year of the football league, some players are injured. Meanwhile, the issue of what football is going to do about Manchester City remains unresolved, and the League seems simply to hope we’ll just forget about it.
Some clubs manage to see a player they want, and get the deal done quickly. These are the clubs that others in the league trust – clubs that are known for keeping their word. Clubs that come along and say, “We’ll give you £35m,” and then do it without mucking around. Not those clubs that say that and then say, “Ah, but our medical record shows he had gastroenteritis five years ago so we’re cutting the price by £5m.”
Of course the clubs that do that get a reputation for such malarky, and so their transfer deals become ever more difficult to complete as they become more and more untrustworthy, and other clubs prefer to sell elsewhere, even if it means getting £1m less.
But the clubs that muck around with their offers keep doing it, because they think they are clever – they think this is the way to get a deal – and when the deal falls through they blame everyone else, although in reality it just adds to their bad reputation. They can still do deals, but time and again the player they get isn’t quite up to the level they expected. But they just keep on…
At the other end of the scale, we learned that out of nowhere, Arsenal have reached a deal for around about n £34m with Club Brugge for the signing of winger Christos Tzolis. As the BBC firmly put it “Arsenal have reached a verbal agreement with Club Brugge to sign attacker Christos Tzolis for 40m euros (£33.9m). The Gunners are yet to table a formal offer for the Greece international, but that is viewed as a formality, while personal terms will not be an issue.” A formality, because everyone knows, you can trust Arsenal.
Of course some selling clubs then try and muck about, but most know, if you deal straight with Asenal, Arsenal deal straight with you.
So here we have a player who has been with PAOK, Noriwic and Club Brugge – in the latter case playing 74 and scoring 33. They were runners-up in the league last season, three points off the winners. The general feeling is that he will cost Arsenal a total of around €40m. There are suggestions in the media that “the pursuit of Tzolis is separate from any interest in signing Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa,” or indeed anyone else. So there is probably more to come.
One of the advantages for this player beyond the football itself is the high quality of English language education in Belgian schools and the fact that the player has already had three seasons with Norwich City so language is not an issue, as long as everyone can get the east of England accent. That sort of thing doesn’t always get mentioned in the media, but it is always a point of enquiry.
On the downside, he has played 34 times for this country, and so is liable to be whisked away at every international break. He joins us with (according to Transfer Markt) Piero Hincapie, Ilan Meslier and Tommy Setford – the latter moving up from the under 21s).
So will there be more? Julián Álvarez has been mentioned but it looks like Arsenal are being outbid by Real Madrid and Barcelona, and when those two fight each other, prices just get to crazy levels. We also see chatter about Morgan Rogers (for whom Villa seem to be asking £100m), Bradley Barcola (PSG) plus of course the multiple made-up tales that keep the media running.
What, of course, we don’t know is how much Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka have really recovered from injury or how much they were pushed to play despite injury when with the England squad. And of course they could still play for England again before getting a holiday and then getting back to Arsenal. It is true that since last September England are obliged to pay for insurance through the Club Protection Programme for players who get injured when with their country, but we haven’t seen enough examples of this yet to know how it really works. I remain somewhat dubious.
