Transfer World

Transfer activity is a counter on a screen. The more money that is spent, the higher the counter goes, the better football gets. Records have been broken, so football must be better than it's ever been.

The pundits circle. Arsenal needed a midfielder. Man Utd needed a star name. If only to justify the existence of the pundit, clubs must need something they didn't get. But never get something they didn't need.

If I was down to my last pound coin, no doubt a pundit would exist who could tell me how I should borrow to spend more of it on their favourite thing.

There's nothing wrong with entirely rejecting the premise of all of the media coverage of the transfer window. It's the truth. It's all pretty much bollocks. That's not to say that there isn't truth to be told about transfers, or valuable opinions to be heard, but the truth is that you never hear much of that during the media coverage.

If the truth was told, we wouldn't need these daft pundits or hack journalists anymore.

A signing is not always a positive. There's a truth that you won't ever hear. Bad signings drain resources, they block good signings in the future, they disrupt teams.

Issues at football clubs do not all need to be solved in the transfer market.

Spending money in itself is not a solution.

It's as if the world of football looked at itself in the most simplistic terms using the simplest generalisations possible - 'the clubs that spend more money do better'. 'Players who cost more are better'. And then, rather than accept that these are simple generalisations, the world of football forgot the actual details and just signed up to the dumbest interpretation of itself. And then built itself around that dumb interpretation.