Striker’s cold and mercantile transfer saga casts doubt on the club’s ability to capitalise on its Saudi windfall
F
ootball is a market. It has always been a market and it is more of a market now than it has ever been before. Everybody is constantly looking for a better deal, and everybody has a price. Every club has its place in the ecosystem and those higher up the chain will always take from those below them, who in turn will take from those below them.
All a club can ever hope to do is to inch their way higher and higher in the structure, to increase the number of clubs they can feed on while reducing the number of predators who can feed on them.
It may be reassuring to think of the legendary servants, the one-club men of the past, but even the term “servants” betrays an uncomfortable truth. From 1885, when professionalism was legalised and the great clubs of the industrial north and Midlands began to acquire talent from Scotland, footballers have been a product to be traded.
