Why do people keep making up transfer stories when 97% of them are wrong

 

• An evening with Arsenal Legends and that missing London League Table
• The personality of referees, and why PGMO is so determined to stay secret

By Tony Attwood

Many football journalists and bloggers whose prime area of writing is transfer rumours – have something rather nasty in common.   For it seems that most of them are narcissists – according to new research.

Narcissists are people with a grandiose sense of self-importance,along with a lack of empathy for others, a desperate need for administration, and a belief that ones talents should be acknowledged by others.

In short, it is the personality of many newspaper football writers, broadcasters and bloggers.

The world of the transfer pundits is a world in which the writers believe that somehow they have superior information that ought to be noted, and they in particular know what is going on.  

The essence of the articles these people write, is generally “I know something special that is happening behind the scenes.”  Of course the “something special” never happens, but this doesn’t matter because by tomorrow the pundit knows something else and is now writing about that.  

We can even put a percentage on the level of narcissistic commentary in football for across the last four summers we have not only recorded the transfer rumours that are spread by the media and bloggers, but the level of success they have in noting transfers that actually happen.

That success rate has in the last two seasons reached the dizzy height of 3% – which is to say that three out of every hundred stories reported turn out to be true.   Prior to that the failure rate was 98%.

And yet amazingly in the face of a 97 or 98% failure rate, the rumours continue to be reported day after day often with the implication that the failure to make the transfer was entirely the club’s fault.  The player was there for the taking, but Arsenal (in our case but other clubs get the same treatment) were just too slow or too miserly, or too inward-looking, or just too damn stupid, to make it happen.

The question of why the narcissists who run transfer tales continue to write them in the face of such a massive error rate is easily answered: being a pundit makes them feel good.  The question of why so many transfers don’t happen is also clear: for the most part, they are total fabrications, and Arsenal (or whichever club is involved) never were looking to buy that player in the first place.

But tucked behind this awful charade of media fantasies is something rather reassuring: for recent research shows that the narcissists who create the tales and write them up, are themselves suffering more than we suffer if we ever start reading their nonsense.

For it seems that most of these fantasy transfer reporters are themselves longing to be recognised as serious writers.  Indeed according to some of the most recent research  (this from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), they feel themselves on the outside, desperately trying to be on the inside – hence the stories they make up and copy from each other, day after day.

In the recent research, the researchers questioned 1,592 people who had through their own answers to questionnaires, shown traits of narcissism including a desire to be seen as important and a need to be admired and recognised.  However their personalities actually tended to make them more likely to be ostracised by their peers, largely it seems because they are pretty intolerable to be with.

In short, for hese people are often (and of course, this is not the case for everyone but is often the case) writing and indeed creating transfer rumours does one thing: it satisfies their own desire to be seen as important.

The research also shows that these people often perceive themselves to have been ignored or excluded.  They are in short “reporting” the rumours (which as our research across the years has shown are 97% useless in terms of predicting a transfer that actually happens) to make themselves feel good, because they feel shunned – generally because of their narcissism.

This is because, by and large, most of us find narcissistic people rather unappealing and not the sort of people we want as friends.

This in turn leads to ever high levels of ostracism which makes the individual more narcissistic.  In terms of football writing, in fact, the more the individual’s wild tales about Arsenal signing this or that player are discovered to be completely untrue, the more the narcissistic person feels excluded and so the more narcissistic they become.

thus in terms of writing about football, the more their football transfer stories fail to predict real events, the more football transfer stories they invent.  The more they are ostracised, the more narcissistic they become.

The full research paper is Büttner, C. M., Rudert, S. C., Albath, E. A., Sibley, C. G., & Greifeneder, R. (2025). Narcissists’ experience of ostracism is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.