Is what we read, really what the world of football transfers is about? People trying to spend £80m and not knowing if the deal ever was possible, let alone whether it is actually still happening, or if the player will fit into the team… Really is that how football is run?
It seems a bit like running a petrol station and saying “We’re going to sell fish and chips” and then “No its ice cream,” and then “No we are sticking to selling petrol,” before suddenly saying, “No we’re closing petrol down completely and opening a store selling second hand CDs.”
In fact, for journalists, most of whom have never spent a single day working for a company outside of the world of journalism, it is all a game of inventing or copying another headline that is a fantasy.
As for the notion of checking the accuracy of any story – those days are long since gone – indeed if you have looked at our summer transfer tracker over the last five years or so, you’ll have noticed that at most Arsenal sign just 3% of the transfers that the media highlights. Sometimes just 2%. What would happen in your job if you got a 98% failure rate?
So, an insight into what’s going on can be found with today’s headlines with their contradictory stories – in reality, they can’t all be even half right,
Take Gyokeres to Arsenal’s ‘collapse imminent’ as Berta makes U-turn on deal – report; that’s from “Give Me Sport”. Which is somewhat different from Football London’sEthan Nwaneri wears Sporting shirtas Arsenal iron out Viktor Gyokeres deal.
But then some deals just never get off the ground as we find with “Arsenal-linked ‘complete’ strikernow set for £58m move to Saudi Arabia” That is from TBR, although of course all transfers that don’t go through are blamed on someone else.
So we are left hanging on because there is still Viktor. And maybe it is not all over because ‘There’s no doubt’ –Viktor Gyokeres message over Arsenal transfer will be comforting. That’s from the Mirror.