It must seem incongruous to the under 25’s that back in the 80s and 90s, once you got on that plane with the rest of the sunseekers in June or July, that was it; incommunicado for a couple of weeks apart from a couple of five minute phone calls to the relatives back home, gloating about the weather and the price of a pint, as well as the obiligatory ‘Have we signed anyone….?’.
Those innocent days of scanning the back pages of a tabloid for a titbit of news from back home, in between checking out the euro-babes around the poolside of whatever package holiday resort you found yourself in that year, seem like a dim and distant memory.
Yes, it’s true, people did pay a fiver for a two day old copy of the Mirror (unless you could get away with reading it at the newsstand before being chased away by an angry Spanish newsagent!). This was for the potential joy of seeing a paragraph or two confirming that your team had finally taken the plunge into the summer transfer market.
I can vividly remember being in Mallorca the close-season that Liverpool signed Peter Beardlsey from Newcastle. The rest of the holiday is a blur as the excitement of getting back home and talking to my mates about what that meant for next season was infinitely more exciting all of a sudden.
This was out of the blue, I had no inkling this would happen, and as for the fee involved (1.9M), mind blowing! How would he link up with the recently acquired John Barnes and John Aldridge? But as drastic action was needed to wrest the title back from Goodison back in the summer of 1987, this was excellent news, all delivered to me by picking up a discarded copy of the Mirror at a bar whilst sheltering from the midday sun.
As we reach that time of year again, a trawl of a few gossip sites, a couple of fans forums and a newspaper site or two (ones that you don’t have to pay for obviously) and the frenzy is there for all to see. From the outlandish ‘Ronaldo to City for £100m’ to the mundane ‘Friedel on a free to Spurs’ to the downright depressing ‘Liverpool to sign random French winger on Bosman’; there are an infinite number of rumours fuelled by an infinite number of fans using an infinite number of ‘sources’.
It is not just the number of the rumours, but it’s the sheer amount of energy and time devoted to this subject that is startling; everyone has an opinion on a player – even if they have never seen them play – and the conviction with which they deliver this opinion is amazing and not a little frightening. The ferocity of the response is no less bewildering. Using their anonymous IDs and ‘wacky’ avatars, the users of message boards, forums etc. waste no time in telling their peers exactly what they think of them (and their mother sometimes) in no uncertain terms.
From the limited sources of yesteryear, reporters (what an archaic term that seems), taxi drivers or your mates at school or at the pub; nowadays the average fan has a myriad of sources about whom they know almost nothing, yet about whom they are willing to make unfounded assumptions.
It’s all fairly stressful to be honest; I have a list of players I would like my team to sign, but I don’t feel compelled to go online and make the case for them whilst rubbishing the counter-suggestions and arguments of those that disagree.
I will chat to a small circle of people, if they agree, fine, if not we will debate it and that’s it.
I won’t make up sources at the club, scour youtube.com for clips and attempt to discredit before finally coming to blows (virtual or otherwise).
Sometimes I ache for more innocent times of having genuine surprise at the signing of a player, or even a player you had never heard of from abroad or the lower leagues, it now seems that nothing can surprise as its all been discussed to infinity and beyond somewhere online.
At this time of year it would be an idea to remember that a large amount of people create an online avatar for themselves to project an identity to virtual peers in a non-physical world. This tends to be a cover for extreme personalities because a) what’s the point in being boring and b) they are insecure!
Try to relax. Don’t believe them. Or simply .. enjoy the banter. The current manager will make what he hopes will be the best signings based on the current squad and his budget. It’s that prosaic. I can’t get too outraged if John Carew is linked to Liverpool because I can’t control it and it probably won’t happen if my manager has half a brain!
If it happens, then my opinions are formed after the fact, not before. The sheer number of players linked to any club means that it is about 0.05% likely to happen. This is real-life, unless you are Man City.
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