HIGH SPENDING AND EXTINCTION GO HAND IN HAND ON TRANSFER DEADLINE DAY

English football seems to deal exclusively in the absurd at present. On Saturday, the champions conceded seven goals for the first time, thrashed by a team who scarcely avoided relegation a few weeks ago. A week earlier, the talk was of technology not doing its job, of the overzealousness of the new handball rule that put the Premier League on pace to award more penalties than the DVLA. At the same time, fans were being invited to watch matches in enclosed cinemas but weren’t able to spectate, even in a socially distanced setting and in reduced numbers, in the grounds.

It should be no surprise then that the chaos continued on transfer deadline day, already the silliest of silly seasons, a 24-hour period where scarcity marketing meets a multi-billion-pound industry with high fan expectation. That’s not a Hollywood meet cute, that’s the start of a horror film, and so it continued in 2020.

It was not the Premier League’s gaudiest day of spending, but there was still plenty of competition for the maddest sequence of events.

Window Shopping

Manchester United spending all summer both tracking and tracing Jadon Sancho without ever making serious contact was certainly a frontrunner. Ed Woodward and co waltzed in, with all the cocksure foolishness of a man browsing hand sanitiser in March and announcing he’d come back next week. No sir, it won’t be available by then.

There is of course something to be said for not hoarding or panic buying, and plenty of observers, including Wayne Rooney, questioned whether Manchester United actually needed to prioritise another wide forward when they already have Mason Greenwood, Marcus Rashford and Antony Martial. It would be easier to give credit to the United board if that was their attitude, but then in that case they probably wouldn’t have spent deadline day hastily buying two teenage right wingers, one of whom won’t arrive until January, for an amount rumoured to be more than the difference in valuations of Sancho.

At its core Woodward and the Glazers’ error was assuming that they could bluff their way through, imagining that the other side would inevitably blink. Dortmund did not blink, and there may be a lesson there for other overpromoted executives trying to reach a trade deal in 2020.

Alternatively, perhaps we are being unfair. Perhaps they did submit a bid, a beautiful offer pasted and merged and summed in excel, only to find that the file size was too small to pay for the kind of generational talent that Sancho represents.

Across the City, Manchester City bought their annual pair of £40m centre backs. Chelsea replaced most of their first team, including a man who was, only two years ago, the most expensive goalkeeper in the world. Tottenham finally replaced Gareth Bale with none other than Gareth Bale, and, if reports are to be believed, came close to replacing Christian Eriksen with Christian Eriksen. Others, particularly those like Brighton and Burnley towards the bottom of the table, were much more parsimonious.

Economies of scale

More urgently and importantly, while the Premier League fiddled with transfers, football’s Rome, the grassroots game, continued to burn. Bury Football club, and its 135 years of history, went up in flames earlier this year. Macclesfield Town followed this month, owing £500,000, or less than the returning Bale’s weekly wage. It was not so long ago that the delayed last day of the distended 19/20 Championship season ended with uncertainty over who was relegated, since it was pending the appeals of multiple clubs against points penalties imposed for falling into administration.

The EFL has warned that more clubs are on the brink and will go under without government or Premier League support. Some, like Burnley boss, and accidental socialist, Sean Dyche, wanted to reject this on the dubious moral ground that hedge fund managers don’t give handouts. Other clubs refused after learning that owners of Championship clubs are worth more than £32bn. What is certain in football is that there is plenty of money, but put it where your mouth is? Don’t be daft. That’s where the caviar goes.

There are exceptions of course, and the efforts of players like Marcus Rashford in particular, arguably now the best advocate for poverty relief in the UK, deserve thorough acknowledgement.

The last dinosaur

Overall though, it is hard to overstate just how tone deaf the last few weeks, and the £1.2bn total Premier League spend this summer, have made football look. It does seem to be encapsulated in what must, even acknowledging the stiffness of the competition, be the maddest piece of transfer deadline day business.

It concerns not clinical striker, not a ball playing centre back, or marauding winger. Instead it involves a man in a dinosaur suit. Exactly what salary Gunnersaurus commanded at Arsenal is not a matter of public record, although one can safely assume that it would be the smallest drop in the ocean at a club that now has 11 players earning more than £100,000 a week.

Even so, Arsenal decided, on Transfer Deadline Day, to terminate its mascot’s contract. Later that evening, without a trace of irony or shame, the club announced that it had triggered the £45m release clause of Atletico Madrid holding midfielder Thomas Partey. The Ghanaian is undoubtedly a good footballer, but should football clubs not aspire to be more than a collection of talented players?

A mascot’s job is to engage with fans, to be a symbol for young children in the community, to represent how joyful and kind and exciting football should be. Yes, Coronavirus reduces a mascot’s role, but was it really necessary for Arsenal to so brutally terminate the contract of Jerry Quy, who has inhabited the Dinosaur costume since 1993? Did it need to fire the 55 others it waved goodbye in August, at the same time as it gave Willian a signing on fee?

It is of course Arsenal’s prerogative to run their finances as they see fit, but from a human and community standpoint, it should and must be asked, not just by Arsenal fans, but by football fans, whether finances are so tight that such cruelties are really necessary? Should an owner who is worth approximately $8.3bn, not be ready to assume some more risk, as well as the potential reward if Arsenal’s on-pitch revolution continues to gather pace?

Instead, it is left to Arsenal fans to show the compassion that its owner seems to be vaccinated against. So far, a GoFundMe page for Gunnersaurus has raised almost £10,000 of a targeted £70,000 to, in the fans’ words “keep him going for another 65,000,000 years”. Gunnersaurus, like so many others in the UK, now takes his transferable scales to the jobs market, betrayed by an employer that has forgotten it is supposed to be much more than that.

Wouldn’t it be nice if football could be different, if football could be better? Or is that just dinosaur thinking.