By Tony Attwood

If there is one thing football journalists can’t stand it is being out maneuvered in their own games.  For years they had clubs wrapped around their fingers by suggesting that the newspaper would be running a story about their rivals getting one over on a club – unless the club gave the journalist a hot tip about a transfer soon to happen.

It sometimes worked, but the perfidiousness of some journos in running the negative story anyway, has often proved too much for some clubs and in recent years clubs have worked at ways of feeding false information to the scribblers to keep th real story secret.

So you will possibly have noticed that stories abound about Arsenal signing and selling all sorts of players, and with the vast majority of these cases, there’s no evidence, no source and no relationship with reality.  

In fact what has been happening is that the journalists have been fed a whole series of tales of transfers that were in fact never going to happen – and for want of anything else to write, they publish.

But the process has left an intriguing and indeed baffling question:  if these journalists knew about the deals and secret ruses, twist and turns that get them done, how come, with all that inside information they are neither working for clubs or as agents?  That of course is a question never posed nor answered although the most likely conclusion is that virtually none of their tales is true, so they have no true stories to tell.

So the media are having fun with Morgan Rogers going to Chelsea and Vinícius Júnior going nowhere, not to mention Júlian Alvarez and Jeremy Monga also not heading for north London.  You would hardly believe that Arsenal were the club with enough knowhow to be able to win the league last season by a whopping great seven points and a GD of +44.

The clue in all this is that the stories are mostly told by the media, not by the clubs.   For now most top clubs now a few people in the press office who take the names of players that their club doesn’t want, but with a stretch of the imagination might want, and start circulating unattributed rumours that a signing is on the way. It gives the journalists something to write about, so the media pick it up, and just occasionally can eve lead to a deal.  Meanwhile the player they want and his club who are willing to sell, do the main deal without fuss.

So the media get worked up about Kenan Yildiz from Juventus, but of course there was no offer.   Same with Bradley Barcola at Paris St-Germain, which at least made life more difficult for Liverpool who had no idea if the Arsenal bid was real or not.  97% of media rumours never result in transfers – see our transfer rumour tables for the last few summers!

Of course one of the reasons the clubs drop hints with these non-existent tales is to lay some misleading cover for the the transfers that are happening.  Another is simply to encourage the journos to stop targeting Arsenal with false tales.

It can also be a way of getting a bit of revenge against a journo who is believed to have messed Arsenal around in the past, as it can leave them asking, “how does this journo know this?” and “who is tipping the scribbler off?”   

But the clue as which story is fake is in the writing, for these journos can never resit throwing in the extra details that the club is upsetting their own fans.   As in “This inability to sign a top-class forward will be a source of frustration for the club’s supporters, many of whom reacted giddily to the idea of Vinícius wearing their shirt. There will be concern, too, that the departures from the Emirates Stadium have left them short up front.”  Poor sad fans – but no really, virtually no one believes the sports journos any more.

So we have the notion that Arsenal have “lost” Leandro Trossard, Gabriel Jesus and possibly Gabriel Martinelli without anyone bothering to count how many plyers Arsenal have left in their squad.  Most clubs as we have noted in these columns, only sign about 22 players aged 21 or over, so that in the next window they have space to pull in new men if there is an urgent need because of an injury or illness.   

Arsenal still have plenty of attacking players,and for three positions in their attack, they have seven options. And yet we are told Arsenal needed more!

And it wasn’t that Arsenal couldn’t score goals – as we have so often noticed, they were the second highest scorers in the PL last season, and that with a new centre forward who spent half the season adjusting to the PL (and its refs ways of doing things).