Transfer chat unlikely balm for the soul

Damian Stack looks at some of the stories making backpage news over the past seven days

IT’S often said – tongue in cheek, we assume – that the people in my profession (sports writers) work in the toy department of the journalistic world. Maybe they’re right. Rarely do we write about anything of life or death importance.

Sport doesn’t move markets or start wars – apart from that one time between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 – but we always rather thought that was the value of it.

As Michael Parkinson so memorably put it on Second Captains some years ago: “sport is not war, or death, or famine – it’s not that at all. It’s the opposite of that. It’s to persuade us of a life outside of that... that’s why sport’s important.”

We need triviality. We need distraction. We need joy and we need escapism and sports provides that to a great many of us. Now more than ever that’s the case. It’s with the return of sport that we’ll find comfort in a world gone mad.

Odd though it may be to say it, but one of the more reassuring things we’ve seen of late has been the return of transfer stories to our back pages. Well if sport is the toy department, then transfer news is the funny pages.

Most of it will never ever come to pass, which is not to say that it’s inaccurate at the time of reporting necessarily, just that facts and circumstances change. As a matter of fact things turn on a dime in professional football, but you have to recognise that when you’re reading a transfer story. Take it with a grain of salt and enjoy it for what it is. A piece of fluff, of mere ephemera.

When for months Liverpool were being linked with German wunderkind Timo Werner it didn’t mean that’s where he’d definitely end up as events of the last week have proven. For one reason or another Liverpool got cold feet and Chelsea jumped in ahead of them.

It’s happened a thousand times before and it will happen a thousand times again... so why then do we bother watching all the twists and turns of these transfer sagas? Why not hold off our interest until a deal is actually done?

Why do we enjoy dramas? Why do people watch Soap Operas? Football is the ultimate soap opera with a cast of characters that come and go. Ones we love and ones we love to hate (yeah, we’re talking about your José).

Transfer stories are silly and more times than not pointless, but just like sport itself that’s what we love about them. Their return is welcome.