- How are Arsenal doing compared with previous starts?
- How can we let out feelings about international shut downs be known?
By Tony Attwood
Most football journalism is a con trick. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment. From a couple of weeks before the transfer window opens, make a note of all the player transfer predictions for Arsenal (or any other club you choose), that you find in the newspapers and online. Keep a note of them; they often appear to be written by people who have inside knowledge as to what the club is doing and who the club is chasing.
Then, when the window closes, take a look at how many of those transfers didn’t happen. If you really have been scouring the media, that number could be as high as 97%.
And yet as you will probably realise, lots of football supporters are regular readers of transfer rumours, often explaining that the club could have bought the players touted, but were too slow or too risk-averse.
It is a clever trick because although the vast majority of these transfers never happen, the blame for running such make-believe is never put on the journalists, but instead on the buying club for being too slow or not being willing to take a risk. The notion that the transfer was unjust a journalisti fantasy is not considered.
So why are the stories believed? Most likely because they are churned out by website after website and newspaper after newspaper, so it appears that with so many outlets mentioning the issue, surely the tale must be true: the buying club (usually Arsenal) is too slow or too mean with its money. The player was there, he wanted to come to Arsenal; his club were willing to sell, but somehow Arsenal couldn’t get the deal done.
It is all a load of turnips of course, but it is repeated month after month because it brings in readers and puts the blame on the club when the deal isn’t done.
But the question is not asked: if Arsenal’s transfer team is so inept, why, after all these years, don’t Arsenal get someone else to run the transfer team?
Second, why hasn’t Arsenal learned that if they want good players, they have to pay for them?
Third, why can’t Arsenal see that they need new players – after all, for the last year journalists have been telling the club that they need a new centre forward?
But there is another side to the tale which the media never print. It goes like this…
First, why don’t these journalists who know all this stuff and could get things sorted, go and work for Arsenal? Second, why don’t Arsenal learn that they’ll never get the players they want using these tactics? Third, why do clubs even bother to talk to Arsenal when they know from reading the papers that Arsenal won’t or can’t conclude deals properly?
In fact, why does anyone even mention Arsenal in a possible transfer tale since Arsenal let so many players slip through their hands?
Of course clubs can become aware of such tactics (it is known as “sparkly marketing”) and again is used to suggest that certain clubs can’t move quickly enough to secure a great deal. The accusation is made so that supporters try and push the club to make the purchase, ignoring the gap between what the player will actually do on the pitch, and what the agent and selling club suggest.
Out of such fantasies comes things like cryotherapy was born – a nonsense belief that crystals speed up recovery from injury. from injury. Try asking someone involved in the approach to show you some scientifically validated evidence that it works and the reply is usually, “Don’t worry if you don’t want to use it, lots of others are doing it.”
Vitamin X taken before a match in moderation will help – as long as you truly and absolutely believe in it. But if your view is “let’s try this and see what happens,” then quite possiby, the improvement will be modest, if there is any at all.
And yet, so many players and so many clubs are so desperate to find improvements, they go on believing, and each believer then tells his tale, and others start to believe it too.
So it goes, so it grows. But that doesn’t make the stories true.
