Aidan Smith: Window shopping leaves us fans very short-changed

Published on Friday 3 September 2010 21:26

Stop me if this sounds oh so familiar: you're thinking about renewing your season ticket but you're undecided. It's a lot of money and will your lot be any good this season? You look around the shop, scan the team photo in the new strip. Well, he's still here and so's he, and that galoot didn't get his move to the Premiership after all.

You flick through the brochure of club-crested merchandise and here are even more of your sometime semi-favourites advertising soaps-on-ropes, driving gloves and big slippers. OK, if they're all back for the campaign then so am I. Maybe you were always going to renew; in any case you were entitled to savour the moment's hesitation. You hand over your near-400 quid and walk out with your little plastic card which entitles you to say: "I belong."

Or alternatively: "I'm a chump." Because what happens after just three SPL games? Your 23-goal striker is flogged.

This is not a rant about players being sold; it's not even a rant about the Old Firm who frantically wave the chequebook around as a sop to their angry fans after humiliating Euro exits. But it is a rant about the transfer window.

Who dreamed it up and for whose benefit? If they've lost more than they've gained come deadline day, it can't help the managers. Their planning has been disrupted. It's bound to anger fans who feel, rightly, that the team they're watching after the window closes isn't the one they were sold. Still, the club treasurers will be happy. The season-ticket money is already in the bank. And football wonders why we're such a bunch of conspiracy-theorists, always smelling rats amid the pie fug.

If your club have gained more than they've lost in the window then you probably think it's a spiffing idea. But, as I remember, the window was instituted as a fairer way, so that clubs were only at risk of losing players for a set period (or periods, since there's another window in January). Well, it hasn't worked like that.

So much business is done on the final day that clubs who lose players have very little time to find replacements. Perhaps the managers always had a pretty good idea of the ones who would go and for some time knew who they wanted to bring in. But broadly, the process of so many footballers moving around over the course of 24 hours in a miasma of agents' furtive phonecalls, unspooling film of their clients' finest moves and flying registration papers is all so desperately random.Inevitably, some players will be moved against their will to clubs who haven't thought the transfers through but just needed to be seen to be doing some business.

In those pre-window days, yes, you could lose players at any time of the season but you were also able to replace with consideration, rather than act like the negligent husband, diving into a department store on Christmas Eve and, minutes before closing, lunging for a bottle of perfume (the wrong kind, too).

Football is a branch of the entertainment industry, so we're always being told, and the media and especially radio have tried to whip up drama about the transfer window by running programmes through to midnight to bring us all the very latest transfer news. At the apogee of the window's novelty, Sportsound had three reporters stationed at Harthill on the M8 monitoring east-to-west movements of footballer-style cabriolets (never the opposite direction) and Chick Young in a helicopter thought he was Milk Tray Man. Patrick Allen in those Barratt ads, more like. But the "excitement" of the window has been short-lived and proven to be spurious. And, when football is placed next to other sectors of entertainment which have longer traditions of being grapsing, it does our game no favours.

Record labels have always ripped off bands and therefore their fans as well. So the story goes, anyway. But an aficionado of, say, the hard-rockin' Steps would not buy their greatest hits knowing that the unthinkable could spoil his fun: that cruel label bosses would request all discs be recalled so the manly vocals of the one they call H could be removed for "contractual reasons"?

Some Hibs fans will be feeling bereft after Anthony Stokes' exit via the transfer window. But who's trusted any kind of window - round, square or arched - since the days of Play School?