By Sir Hardly Anyone
With football in the summer I guess we all have a choice. First, we can forget about it – Arsenal are not playing, and there so there’s no real excitement. Play table tennis, read a book, go swimming….
Second, we can follow the internationals to make sure that our players don’t get injured. This summer we are helped by the fact that there are only four Arsenal men involved in the tournament, which reduces the risk.
Third, we can believe the transfers apparently being negotiated for by Arsenal. 73 are players coming to Arsenal this summer according to the various websites and newspapers. And if previous seasons are anything to go by this number will probably reach around 110 by the time the outlets are telling us about the window “slamming shut”.
Fourth we can wonder at how and why journalists who repeatedly get the transfer stories so wrong (out of those 110 each year we normally only find about three or four actually come to Arsenal) are still employed to do so. In any other industry a success rate of just 3% year on year would have resulted in the sack years ago.
Or fifth, we can play “spot the idiot”. For depending on how you read these things we either have a tale of Arsenal’s incompetence or a tale of journalistic incompetence. Which is it?
Or finally we can have a competition for the most stupid headline of the day. How about this one…
‘This club is finished’: Some Arsenal fans are frustrated with transfer update on 21-year-old’
Of course to be clear the writer of the article might not have created the headline him/herself; there is no way of telling. But Dylan Walsh wrote the article, and he describes himself as “a football journalist … on the lookout for my next full-time position. I have been writing about football for over seven years, and have been a working professional in the industry since 2017 as an accredited Premier League and EFL reporter. I am a driven individual who can spot a good story that can cater to a certain audience and deliver work to a high standard of quality.”
So one reason he is putting out a tale like that appears to be so he can advertise his wares as a journalist. And you’d be amazed how many of the transfer stories fall into this category.
For yes, a lot of transfer rumours are invented by unemployed journos looking for a job!
The article this chap quotes is a report in Flemish (we have to trust his translation since Google translate doesn’t have Flemish as one of its languages) which claims, “Arsenal have reportedly had a bid rejected for R.S.C. Anderlecht midfielder Albert Sambi Lokonga.”
“Reportedly” isn’t a word you hear or see much, other than in these transfer rumour tales, but in essence it means “someone else has said it but I’m not sure who”.
So someone, somewhere, has told an out of work wanna be journo that Arsenal have offered €15m for a 21-year-old midfielder. That puts it in context.
As do the other stories the same writer has given us of late…
If you’d like to be part of the game, just beef yourself up on Linkedin, pick a club, and a player no one is likely to have heard of, and make up a tale.
Meanwhile in case you missed it all, in the real world, Arsenal have been involved in a revolution….
The Glorious 2021 Revolution
- Why Arsenal absolutely must not “allow the players to play”
- How Arteta gave us a hint of what he was about to do, but we missed it.
- For the last two thirds of last season, Arsenal were a top two club
- The audacious tactical change that sent Arsenal charging up the league table
- Figures from Football Observatory at the end of the season showing Arsenal players dominating the statistics.
