The Championship Manager Era: Is Our OBSESSION With Transfers Ruining Football?

If Roman Abramovich, Sheikh Mansour and Florentino Perez prove one thing, it's this: Championship Manager is alive and well in the real world of football. And just like the computer game, you can cheat.

The way these guys approach the game isn't just changing the shape of the top table in European football. They're changing the way we, the fans, think about the game we love, by turning the transfer market into an off-season league, a lawless, attention-seeking vanity-contest where points are scored for headlines and column inches.

The newspapers respond, and pretty soon you've got a generation of fans for whom the buying and selling of players - once a tedious sideshow to the real business of actually playing the sport - has taken on an importance as inflated as a bulging blue paper wage-packet marked "Adebayor".

Sure, there's something titillating about the gossip, the intrigue, the long wrangles between players and agents and clubs, but it's not really football, is it? Football is something that happens in real time, before your eyes. Football's defeats and victories are measured in goals, not dollars.

Yet like a vast Human Resources team, we obsess about the most obvious external feature of the game - who plays for who, and who might play for someone else in the future. Football might be a tremendous visual and atmospheric banquet for the senses, but many of us are much more interested in personnel changes. It's a staffing issue, really, and it's got us hooked.

The obsession reached farcical new proportions when 80,000 Madridistas turned up to see Ronaldo ponce down a catwalk in a new kit. Amid the flashbulbs and the immaculately whitened teeth, there was little chance that a game of football might actually break out.

Championship Manager has become a reality. It provides the paradigm structure through which elite football is increasingly being governed (by billionaires) and consumed (by us). These billionaire are just like casual gamers, little interested in the technical aspect of football, they instead enact fantasies of their personal power by buying up as many big names as they can.

Manchester City's transfer strategy this summer appears to have been determined entirely by reputation. They have bought without imagination, over-paying for the most established names they could tempt with their vast salaries.

Mark Hughes might look smugger with every press conference he holds, but a seven-year-old with a subscription to MATCH! magazine would have bought him a pretty similar bunch of players.

Arsene Wenger minted a choice phrase when he described the seasonal transfer market shenanigans as "financial doping".

He's right. It's unfair, artificial, and contrary to the spirit of fair competition, where prizes are won by sweat and guile.

As they count their cash and consider the future of international football, FIFA and UEFA would do well to reflect that football has become the world's game because of the game itself and the joy it brings, not because of a few marquee signings.

2 Comentarios

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Por teddy ruxspin

12.08.2009 16:54

"YES" and nearly all the money is leaving the game !

Por Pactows

13.08.2009 16:23

but what really matters is how managers can make works their teams. Football is about passion, determination, confidence and faith. Millions and Millions can fly, but not higher as dreams