The moment we knew that the Premier League had lost its mind
Walker’s a fine player and City a great club, but £54m?
IHAVE a loose grasp of the concept of inflation. My programme at Stockport County used to be 40p. Now it’s £3. It used to cost me £1.20 to get into the Stretford End and now it’s £13. Not that you can just turn up and pay at the turnstile at Old Trafford now, obviously, but that’s a different kind of change.
So I get it. I understand you can’t just judge Premier League transfer fees in isolation and stare stupidly, mouth agape, when ordinary players are sold for £5 million or £10m and some agents make more than the best managers in the game. It’s the football economy, stupid.
Transfer fees rise and there will be surprise and outrage in equal measure when barriers are broken. It was that way when Middlesbrough made Alf Common the first £1,000 footballer by signing him from Sunderland in 1905 and it was the same again when Brian Clough paid to make Trevor Francis the first £1m footballer in 1979.
We are edging closer and closer to the world’s first £100m footballer as the sport bobs around contentedly in its very own South Sea Bubble, making multi-million aires of players, agents and coaches and laughs in the face of repeated warnings that this kind of boom simply cannot last.
There is a growing debate, fuelled by a spate of redundancies at ESPN in America and by economies made by Sky in the UK after its most recent Premier League television deal, about whether the levels of money paid for sports rights is now teetering on the edge of viability. But everybody tries not to think about that too much.
AND in the meantime, the spending grows. Premier League clubs have already spent £630m in this transfer window and there are still 46 days until it closes. We are on course to burst through the £ 1bn barrier again. In our national sport’s loadsamoney culture, that moment will surely be worthy of a celebratory slap of our wad on the table.
But inflation is one thing and the spend, spend, spend attitude of our clubs is quite another. Some of them seem to be caught up in a title race all of their own this summer: who can blow all their television money first? Who can waste the riches that have been bestowed upon them the fastest?
There is a critical moment in every inflationary spiral when you realise that something has gone very wrong and in our Premier League that moment came on Friday afternoon, when Manchester City paid Spurs £ 54m for Kyle Walker. That was the moment we all knew the Premier League had lost its mind.
Look, Walker is a fine player with a lot to offer and the modern City is a club to admire that tries to do things the right way. But we just made a right-back the most expensive English player ever. We just made Walker the most expensive defender in the world.
It’s not his fault but it’s enough to make you question the sanity of the people who run our clubs.
‘Full-back Kyle Walker becomes the world’ s most expensive defender at £ 50m plus,’ Gary Lineker wrote on Twitter on Friday night. ‘Imagine how much he would cost if he could cross the ball.’ Walker for £54m: it’s like one of those news stories about an estate agent offering a property for sale in Knightsbridge for £5m and it turns out it’s a cupboard under the stairs. And then somebody pays the asking price for it.
It’s not personal. Once again, I like Walker as a player and I like City as a club. I think he’ll improve them as a team too. It’s just that it is a transfer that is a symbol of the headlong profli gacy t hat has gripped our football. Now, more than ever, this feels like a league intent on burning its riches on a bonfire of its vanities.
We’re the Mel B of the world game, raking it in, spending it all and then wondering what the hell happened when the good times stop rolling. We are paying the price for living in a world where we all demand instant gratification. So when City didn’t get Dani Alves, only Walker would do.
Not all clubs are guilty. Everton have spent a lot of money but they appear to have spent wisely. Other teams are still waiting and watching and planning. Maybe they are the ones who think, like many observers, that a financial reckoning is coming. Or maybe they just play the market better.
Top clubs will always play top dollar for top quality. AC Milan have just spent more than £30m to buy Leonardo Bonucci from Juventus and Real Madrid may be about to set a new world record to sign Kylian Mbappe from Monaco. These are players to build a team around.
But in England now, intoxicated with our television money, throwing bills around like Floyd Mayweather Jr at a pool party, we are spending cash like fools, without discretion and often with very little discernment. Walker cost almost twice as much as Bonucci. Think about that.
The beneficiaries, sadly, are agents, who get richer and richer and foreign clubs who can’t believe the fees they are getting from the Premier League and laugh all the way to the bank. More often than not, they reinvest that money wisely and use it to improve their fortunes.
We spend but whether we improve is a moot point. One club in the last eight of the Champions League last season and none in the semi-finals tells its own story. More money than sense is a phrase that could have been coined especially for us.