So frenzied is the summer trading that Keane’s six were no more than a tiny drop in the ocean of transfers. While the window was open in July and August, 512 players were transferred into or out of English clubs alone. Not every move had the shock value of Argentinians Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano landing at West Ham United, the club that for so long had been an English academy, grooming schoolboys from Bobby Moore to Trevor Brooking to Frank Lampard. Not every deal was conducted with such cloak-and-dagger venom as Arsenal and Chelsea haggling until midnight over Ashley Cole and William Gallas.
But all of the 512 — approaching one-quarter of the professionals employed in the country — are somebody’s sons. All were moved up or down the spiral of sporting ambition and earning power. And all involved a judgment call by managers or board members thinking that they were the players who might spark the necessary surge which would help take their club where it wants to be.
It is a crude business, driven by agents whose annual income is now concentrated into a few months, and preying on the fickle directors, some of whom could not explain why they are footing the bills. England is not alone. It has become a big player in the global market, especially this year since the new £1.7 billion television deal was announced. That money, from BSkyB and Setanta, does not come on stream until 2007- 10, but the panic buying now may reflect the fear of clubs being relegated from the Premiership before the huge new pay-outs, which represent a 67% increase on current television rights.
In Spain, Italy, Germany and France there are also TV hikes, but no league matches the Premiership for global coverage. And as the Russians and Americans, and now an Iranian, (albeit one raised in Britain) buying into club boardrooms show, a different breed of owner is coming here for the spoils of the game. In spending terms the Premiership is the wealthiest league, although Chelski’s £375m spent on players since Roman Abramovich arrived in July 2003 accounts for one-third of that expenditure and provides the impetus for spending at home and abroad.
The £30m for the 29-year-old Andriy Shevchenko, plus wages, sets the benchmark, yet of the top 23 transfer fees paid by European clubs this summer, 10 were by Spanish clubs, nine English and only two each in Germany and Italy. Those figures were massaged by the plundering of star players from the fallen Juventus by three clubs in the main, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Inter Milan.
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Only time will tell whether the wholesale changes at Real Madrid, or the more subtle adjustments at Barcelona, or the perplexing accumulation of talents at Inter can be made to gel into the sum of those parts. That is the art of management, and Roberto Mancini is about to be tested on his merits as a team-builder under the acquisitive Internazionale president, Massimo Moratti, just as much as Keane, at another level, has to mould something better than his chairman and quick-fire managerial predecessor, Niall Quinn, knew how to achieve.
Some old-timers may observe that nothing has really changed. At the turn of the last century, Sunderland bought and sold Alf Common three times, tripling the price of the centre-forward until in 1904 they created the first £1,000 transfer by moving him on to Middlesbrough.
Common was called a mercenary then. The same word reverberated Down Under this weekend when Dwight Yorke quit Sydney FC to join Sunderland. “Yorke simply behaved like most seasoned pros,” commented the Sydney Morning Herald. “He’s a mercenary, no more, no less. This is not Yorke’s fault for he has been immersed in the moral quagmire of professional football since he was 16 and knows no different.”
Yorke, in his dotage, had been the catalyst for Australia’s attempt to launch a professional football league. His past as a Manchester United striker helped create the aura, but his salary became an albatross around Sydney’s neck. The club, champions but more than £2m in debt, gratefully accepted Sunderland’s £200,000.
That, in microcosm, is what happens the world over. The clubs that have money buy, those that lack it sell, and those with the most vested interest in putting together the money and the “meat” are the agents.
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In the shadows of London’s two most intriguing deals cut on Friday was Pini Zahavi. The Israeli is football’s master broker, having introduced Abramovich to Chelsea and having a long association with West Ham stretching from the days when Rio Ferdinand was a lad. When the Hammers most needed it, Zahavi helped the club’s dried-up cashflow when Chelsea paid up front the £6m fee for Glen Johnson three years ago. His influence was there in both the Argentinians coming, at least for a short time, to Upton Park, and the conclusion of the Ashley Cole saga.
His is a crowded profession, Fifa’s list of approved agents numbering 2,668. Each has toprovide a certificate of professional liability insurance covering his clientele, or lodge a bond of 100,000 Swiss francs (£42,600) with Fifa.
Figures can tell us everything or nothing about football, because, as most of us appreciate, there are hundreds of clubs chasing a handful of trophies. But it was Fifa which, afraid of the way players (and agents) were holding clubs to ransom in the wake of the Bosman freedom-of-contract ruling, devised the transfer “window” system.
The effect has been that clubs, bombarded with offers, have become like many of us at Christmas, buying on impulse because of the pressures of the market place. The comment of this weekend came from Jon Smith, a successful agent, who observed: “It has become a rabid world. There are too many agents trying to scrap over deals, and many aren’t making money. In some cases the agent has to think of himself rather than the player. Maybe it’s not the best move for the player, but the agent needs petrol for his Jag.”
Once the summer window shuts, it’s a long road to January, when, for one month only, the agents get more petrol money by helping clubs to top up with what they missed out on in August, or to cut their losses on purchases made in error.