Transfer Muppet:

One who enjoys the fantasy football excitement of potential transfers and new signings over the joy of the game itself.

Ah Summer. That magical time in a fan’s life. Too early for disappointment, too late for regret. A respite from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. To sleep, perchance to dream. Where Liverpool fans can still reach the Champions League, Tottenham fans can hope for a push at the title, and Stoke fans can imagine the joy of scoring from open play.

Unless you’re a transfer muppet that is. For to a transfer muppet the summer is a season unto itself, with all the fits and starts, ups and downs and inevitable crushing disappointment of a real playing term. To the transfer muppet the season gone has merely been a warm up for this. A chance to identify potential transfers, suss out the accuracy of Football Manager stats, and Photoshop Brazilians onto last years team portraits to see what they look like in your side’s kit.

In the fabled days or yore, when footballers were real men, with real men’s moustaches and tiny women’s shorts, and players thought nothing of playing on with a shattered spine deep into extra time, transfers were conducted in private. Not secretly, or in any clandestine manner, just straightforwardly, and when your team had signed a player you knew because your team had signed a player.

In the opulent days of now, where footballers are supermen, with superhuman hair and shiny pink shoes, and players think nothing of high performance physical feats like rolling seven or eight times to maximise the drama of a shirt pull, transfers are drawn out over months. You still know when your team has signed a player when your team has signed that player, but you’ll think you’ve signed that player 14 times before the transfer actually goes through, even if it doesn’t.

In the summer of 2010 Manchester United signed Wesley Sneijder an average of 3 times a week without actually signing him, because he’d elected to stay at Inter Milan an average of 3.5 times a week. Between 2011 and 2012 both Real Madrid and Chelsea bought Luka Modric a staggering 27 times a piece, beating out Manchester City, who only signed him a paltry 9 times, before Madrid eventually won out by actually buying him in reality.

The transfer muppet’s insatiable desire for transfer news aligned with their tragic inability to shape events through sheer concentrated power of will has lead to a vacuum in the reporting world know colloquially as “White’s Gamble”. Simply put; The demand for transfer news, divided by the actual amount of transfer information available, times by the number of phones Jim White has on his person at any given moment = the probability of a professional journalist reporting on an baseless transfer rumour.

This shouldn’t be confused with “Twitter’s Gambit” which although similar, clearly states that demand divided by information, times the amount of people on Twitter with an important sounding but misspelled account handle = The likelihood 50 + people will have re-tweeted a report that the transfer is already done.

Whilst certainly not absent from the lower rungs of the football garden, transfer muppetry exists in it’s most pure form at the top of the tree, where reporters know the fan base of a Manchester United or Barcelona will guarantee their story the maximum amount of attention, or better yet, the currency of the 21st century; Hits.

This summer the most frenzied muppet activity has focused on two prospective events. Thiago Alcantara’s move to either Manchester United or Bayern Munich and Gonzalo Higuain’s transfer to Arsenal.

Whilst United the club exist firmly in the hallowed realm of desirable superclubs, Manchester the City doesn’t. This combined with their ever-confusing financial status – making it impossible to determine how much they’ve actually available to spend – means that whilst constantly linked to all of the world’s top players, they rarely ever actually sign any from beyond the Premier League. This creates a perfect breeding environment for muppets. Always excited, never fulfilled.

Right now there is nothing more cherished to a United muppet than news of a big midfield signing, and so reports of Thiago Alcantara’s apparent desire to join the Moyes project at Old Trafford has seen his thread on United’s biggest forum reach over 14,000 posts and 2,000,000 views in under a month. This is despite absolutely nothing official from either party being uttered in any form during the same span. The only person who’s said anything on the matter has been Pep Guardiola, who now looks set to hijack a transfer that was never officially on, thus restoring the natural order.

While United may not always land the big fish, they do spend freely, and their muppets know they can be relied on to at least poach someone from Tottenham. Arsenal muppets know better. Experience has wearied their hopes and hardened their hearts.

There was once a time, long ago, when the Arsenal muppet frolicked gayly in the summer months, warmed by the knowledge that Wenger was a genius, that every signing would be turned into a crucial cog in the passing machine, and that if no signings were made, the kids would beat a half strength Championship side in the Carling Cup and everyone would naturally assume the future was red and white.

But then the well dried up, the trophies stopped, and Arsene Wenger decided the Rugby approach to reaching the goal line was morally superior to buying any decent strikers. But the Arsenal muppet is still a muppet. Still clinging desperately to the idea that any baseless transfer gossip has some shred of truth to it. So when reports surfaced that Gonzalo Higuain had flown for a medical in London last Friday, seemingly doing so under Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility, the Arsenal muppet dared himself to hope, perchance to dream. But like 90% of these stories, it was simply lies. Lies, dammed lies and statistics. And it’s going to get worse.

When Transfer Deadline Day arrives and Jim White, resplendent in his majesty, conducts proceedings from his stainless steel throne as gormless reporters stand aimlessly in front of training grounds, swamped by hungry packs of transfer urchins desperate for updates on the whereabouts of Lee Cattermole, remember this. If you learn one thing from this summer’s deluge of transfer stories, online gossip, inside sources and “we understand”s, it should be this;

Go outside. It’s sunny.