It's Too Easy to Hate Transfer Deadline Day

Crystal Palace ultras the Holmesdale Fanatics aren't big fans of transfer deadline day

In a 2010 radio interview tied to his excellent co-authored book On Kindness, the writer and psychotherapist Adam Phillips suggests that the capitalist system is “for children”, in that it easily exploits our desires. Phillips says that if “people are not given time to find out what they want, they tend to grab things”. Capitalism actively encourages this grabbing, of course, which is probably why you spent last night BBMing appalling abuse to any Spurs fans you know while flicking between an eplsite stream of Sky Sports News and three separate Twitter feeds while eating a pizza you'd ordered on your phone.

The "Barclays Premier League", in conjunction with Sky Sports, is now accepted as one of the dark towers of capitalism, a great lidless eye that will destroy us with Super Sundays, in-play betting and transfer gossip. It’s a carnival of magnificent distraction that reaches a fever pitch of bluster on Sky Sports’ Transfer Deadline Day, during which young women in tight dresses and middle-aged men in tight suits frantically bring you the latest on which football clubs are desperately grabbing at which players. These presenters, presiding over a nationwide network of cameras like a herd of Ed Harrises in The Truman Show, bring the intensity of election night to the buying and selling of football players.

While every club talks about “doing its business early”, none are immune to the lure of Transfer Deadline Day and the ones run by publicity-hungry celebrity CEOs and wheeler-dealer managers basically seem to conduct all their signings in one glorious run of rushed medicals and 25th hour faxes. If you've seen it before – and if you're reading this, let's face it, you definitely have – you didn't miss anything new as it unfolded yesterday. As usual, Piers Morgan whined about Arsene Wenger on Twitter and Guillem Balague overcooked the pronunciation of Spanish surnames. Sky Sports anchor Jim White and former Manchester United coach Rene Meulensteen discussed Falcao’s potential move to United, their legs crossed toward each other like two mid-ranking executives in the bar of a provincial hotel congratulating themselves on another killer round of conference speeches.

Falcao and Danny Welbeck provided the drama of the night but while managers and chairman were grabbing at players like hungry drunks grabbing at closing time McNuggets, other stories were being played out. Away from the Jim White set pieces, the last-minute transfer dealings have provided some smaller joys and heartbreaks. It’s the big, end-of-the-night deals between Champions League clubs that get salivated over but it’s often different ones that leave a bigger impression on fans.

Micah Richards – who joined Manchester City in 2001, aged 14, and left the club yesterday to go to Fiorentina on loan – was one of these smaller joys. Richards was the first-team squad’s one link to the time before Manchester City became just another asset in the portfolio of the royal family of Abu Dhabi. He represented something homegrown, something that hadn’t just been bought up with petro-pounds. I’ve been told that the club knew this and wanted to keep him as living proof that City hadn’t just become another soulless corporate machine. Richards was John Prescott to City’s Tony Blair, kept in power as a way of making traditional supporters feel less bad about themselves. Vincent Kompany – ever the savvy, relentlessly trained media operator – tweeted an appropriate goodbye.

#MCFC club legend! Proud to have played 6 years alongside this man. Congratulations and good luck at @ACF_Fiorentina my brother #forzaMicah

— Vincent Kompany (@VincentKompany) September 1, 2014

Now Richards is gone, not only is that phoney symbolic link broken but we get to see if he can revive his career at a club that have always had a sense of style, the club of Batistuta, Rui Costa and the classic viola kit. On the banks of the Arno, under passageways once inhabited by Medici spies, Richards will be given the chance to find the answers to some of the questions that have dogged his career of late. Doubts over his ability to play a sustained amount of football may be physical in nature but you get the sense that the journey Richards is setting out on is more of an existential one. The thought of him lining up against Ashley Cole in a Roma shirt is almost quixotic – here, at least, are two English players willing to abandon parochialism.

Elsewhere, Hull City pulled in a number of out-of-favour flair merchants in Hatem Ben Arfa, Mo Diame and Gaston Ramirez. Ben Arfa in particular possesses the potential to have an effect similar to that of a deadline day coup from the very early days of the phenomenon, Christophe Dugarry, who was signed on loan by the same manager, Steve Bruce, for Birmingham City in 2003. Ben Arfa is the kind of wayward talent that fans love and managers end up hating. He was made to cancel a “meet and greet session” he’d planned with fans earlier this summer because Alan Pardew regarded it as “provocative”. His departure will have plenty in Newcastle cursing the silver-haired Cockney’s methods of control, while diehard Geordie Steve Bruce's eyes glaze over and bleed away into the near distance as he dreams of pairing that lot with the eruptive talents of Abel Hernandez, Tom Ince and Paul McShane.

An Everton fan rails against the bluster of transfer deadline day in his own unique way

Away from the obscene trumpeting of the £800 million plus that has been spent by Premier League clubs this transfer window, it’s the players who leave, often quietly, who speak to something more than the distracted grabbing of our economic culture. It’s hilarious and exciting but it’s hard to feel overly romantic about the prospect of Falcao being paid a reported £265,000 a week for a year-long loan, particularly when you realise that his agent, Jorge Mendes, also represents a number of other Manchester United players and is now so chummy with the club’s chief executive, Ed Woodward, that he texts him “family photographs”.

It’s hard to feel romantic too about Stoke parting with £50,000 a week and a cool mill for the pleasure of watching Oussama Assaidi cut inside and hit shot after shot into waiting defenders, though it is funny, as is Fabio Borini asking QPR for £90,000 a week or Harry Redknapp going back to what he knows (again) and getting in Sandro and Niko Kranjcar for the second and 145th time respectively. The old sentimentalist wanted Jermain Defoe back from Canada too, but will have to wait at least until January for whatever illicit thrill that seems to bring to him.

There’s some bleak poetry in Tom Cleverley heading back down the motorway to Manchester, having failed to sign for Everton, that familiar rebirthing chamber of United's dead or at least players who are frequently threatened with death by irate Singaporeans on social media. Now, Cleverley is likely doomed to the same state of purgatory as the 26 poor souls currently loaned out by Chelsea, all potentially bit-part players in a multi-narrative Hollywood tale in which one plucky young guy impresses a Russian billionaire by really making an impact at a mid-ranking European league side. It will be worse for Cleverly; he will be in Birmingham.

There’s something heartening, though, in the fact that, having had their dressing room pillaged by Liverpool, Southampton now have enough good players to press their way to a mid-table finish under a classy international legend, the same way Swansea did under Michael Laudrup. And over at Selhurst Park, some of Crystal Palace's ultras got the flares out and staged a protest to show just how much they hate transfer deadline day – which is weird, given they signed James McArthur (though perhaps they were haunted by their current manager's performance a few years back).

Away from the Premier League, it was warming to see that, despite no longer being run by Mohamed “the Royal Family killed my son” Al Fayed, Fulham are more than capable of doing some of the window’s most eye-catchingly bad business. In fact, as £12 million man Kostas Mitroglou returned to Greece having only made one start, to be replaced by Matt Smith, yet another striker plundered from a Championship rival for too much money, it was hard not to conclude that Al Fayed was the man holding Fulham together. The fact that Matt Smith had come from Leeds only added to the air of drunken late-night shopping.

Liverpool fans, having gloried awkwardly in that pillaging of Southampton earlier in the summer, received their biggest jolt hours before deadline day heated up. Daniel Agger, always fiercely loved on the Kop, had written an open farewell letter to those who’d supported him during all his years in England, which the Liverpool Echo published yesterday morning. Liverpool had let him return to his first club, Brondby, for a cut-price fee, like a creaking Viking warrior being put in his longboat and sent back to his place of rest. All day, as Liverpool tried to flog bit-part players to anyone who’d take them, Agger’s letter sat near or at the top of the Echo’s most-read articles, his loss felt not as something drummed up by breathless presenters but as something earned over seasons on the pitch.

The mainline entertainment of transfer deadline day may be provided by the big clubs flailing at comic-book-talented South American superstars, but away from this spectacle there’s still some smaller joy to be found. Though perhaps not at Blackpool, whose local newspaper wasted 13 futile hours on this.

@oscarrickettnow

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