• Why the number of penalties Arsenal “escaped” is irrelevant
• How can we be assured that Fifa is a fair, reasonable and democratic organisation?

By Tony Attwood

Man City threaten legal action after Real Madrid candidate ‘guarantees’ Erling Haaland signing…

That is a headline which I thought was interesting.   So I asked two legal friends if you could sue someone for boasting, and they both agreed you’d only stand a chance of winning if you could show that others believed the story and it actually hurt you or cost you. But it was felt it would be a tough case to win, because people know that the papers make things up.

So if someone went around saying I was married to a particular lady and I wasn’t, I couldn’t stand much chance in court of winning anything unless I could show that the suggestion of my marriage harmed me in some very particular way.

Now applying this to Real Madrid’s boasting about acquiring a new player, the injured party would be Manchester City, and so the case would fall under English law, and ManC would have to show that they had been materially harmed by the story.   

So if Haaland believed the tale, and then demanded a transfer from ManC because he felt the club didn’t value him and were ready to sell him, ManC could claim in court that they had been damaged by the newspaper report.

Except Haaland’s lawyers would argue that if anyone believed a story just because it was in an English newspaper, then that person was an idiot, and the law was there to protect reasonable people, not idiots.

Which is why, although 97% of transfer rumours don’t happen, none go to court.  People simply don’t believe the rumours, most of which seem to be invented a) to keep the fans of the buying club happy, b) to unsettle the player and annoy his current club and c) to give journalists something to write about without doing any work.

And since we have shown in recent years that 97% of the transfer stories never turn into actual transfers, it surely would be argued in court that no club directors in their right minds ever believe what is published about football in the media.  This leaves the media free to say anything they want, because in cases of slander or libel, it is generally not enough to show that something has been written or said; one has to show that people are likely to believe it.

So if I said that player X playing for club Y was actually not human but an alien, that would be quite hard to bring to court as a complaint, since it is unlikely that an average football fan in their right mind would ever believe the tale.  

In fact, this is what protects most journalists in terms of football stories – the average person does not believe them in the first place.  And quite rightly, since as we have shown, 97% of the transfer rumours each summer never actually happen – something which most supporters are perfectly well aware of.   Readers don’t believe, the writers know the readers don’t believe, no one is hurt.

So why do newspapers and blogs keep running these stories?

One reason, of course, is that they feel they have to publish something, and no one can think of anything else to write.  A story about a change of tactics would be interesting, but journalists often feel tactics stories are a bit too much for their readers.

But there is a danger here, because all of this activity up to and through each transfer window suggests to the unobservant fan that their club is about to buy someone, when in fact there is no evidence most of the time that anything is going on in terms of transfers.

Yet fans, the journalists and editors argue, want to feel that their club is busy buying, and besides, everyone else is publishing transfer rumours, so they keep doing it otherwise (as one journo said to me) “people would simply buy a different paper or read a different website”.

Now there is an argument that says, well, so what?   It’s been like this for years, and really, no harm is done.  Except that we know that the price of players goes up all the time, and it is possible that all this invented activity is the cause of player inflation each window.  I mean, if there was just silence, might it not make everyone think no clubs were buying?  Prices would come down, and then clubs would be less in debt.  But as things stand, only about four PL clubs make a profit each year.

So maybe next time we read how much clubs are paying for players, we should all stop and think – the reason the cost of entry to the ground has got this high, is because the newspapers make transfers virtually their only story they have in each window.

The current system encourages clubs to pay far too much for players, and such costs result in our tickets going up and up in price.  The solution is to work harder and harder at recruiting high-quality youngsters, and that I think is what Arsenal are doing.