Window into an amazing and amusing world

LOCKER ROOM:The January transfer window is a learning instrument for those keeping an eye on the future of world football and on young men like Frank Acheampong of King Faisal Babies

JANUARY IS a long month for the huddled masses of the sportswriting trade. It’s a loaves and fishes kind of deal. A multitude of pages to be fed. About five loaves and two fishes worth of action with which to feed them. Predictions.

Looking forward in languor. That sort of thing. And since we made the big switch to global warming the weather can clear the table of fresh loaves and fishes as well.

There was a time when prosperity was more than just a rumour in this country and the sports editor might send a hack along to the Superbowl to write one of those “only in America” pieces. And then advertisers and sponsors starting flying hacks to the Superbowl for free and some of us got a dose of ethical correctness and wouldn’t go for free and thus wouldn’t be sent at all as the paper found it hard to justify paying for a seat and a hotel that everyone else was taking for free.

Besides which, the thrill was gone when half a planeful of Irish hacks were heading stateside pretending to speak the language of gridiron for their “only in America” pieces.

At the opposite end of the spectrum was covering ‘the darts’ at Purfleet, a little piece of London which is forever Siberia. People in showbusiness (with a few sad exceptions) only play panto at two stages of their careers. On the way up and on the way down. So it is with covering the darts. You’d put your hand up to cover the Goal Mile on Christmas Day rather than make that lonesome trudge.

For fresh air, there's the Blue Stars. There's the bit of oul rugby for them what loves it. Best of all there is the opening of the transfer window in soccer. I love the window. J'adore le fenetre. Is breá liom an fhuinneog.

Most football fans are a bit conflicted about the transfer market and the sight of owners trampling about the place throwing large cheques into the air like confetti. It was exciting, stylish and fun when Peter Ridsdale did it; corrupt, shortsighted and vulgar when Roman Abramovich tried it. Huge money being spent to reverse the balance of power was refreshing when Leeds bought Rio Ferdinand for €21 million ten years ago. It was obscene when Manchester United bought Ferdinand for close on €35 million just two and a half years later.

The window has a lovely amorality to it and with Luciano Becchio already tied down by Leeds and with Tomas Brolin and Darren Huckerby no longer available as human shredding machines for cash, this January promises to be as exciting for us Leeds fans as most Januarys are for Robbie Keane’s agent. Leeds rewarded Andy O’Brien’s brace of own goals last week with a contract which ended his loan spell and that should mean the shop is shut till this time next year when we are in the race for Europe and may have to spend.

Even if Leeds do spend it’s not guaranteed it will be folly. I would still argue for instance that Leeds got more value back before the potato famine out of signing Johnny Giles from Manchester United than Old Trafford got out of signing Eric Cantona many eras later. And there has been the odd decent signing in between.

I liked the old transfer system which was basically a free for all, a monument to pure capitalism but the current method is preferable in terms of fun. It is amazing and amusing how the window makes a footballer get all hormonal from about late November onwards. He misses home, he misses the children, he misses the motorway, he misses Sally O’Brien and the way she might look at him. All these are intangibles which money just can’t buy but a revised contract can certainly help.

Christmas must affect football managers in ways even more distressing than it hurts turkeys. When signing the new centre forward last year it probably seemed a good idea to give him one of those deals whereby he would always be the highest paid footballer at the club. But now the beloved home-grown midfielder wants that particular deal for himself if he is to be persuaded to stay. And if he gets it, which he has to because the chairman has decreed it shall be so, then the manager has to sit down with the centre forward who will hear all about it pretty quickly anyway.

And he’ll have to sit down with about six other players who have been in the team far longer but earn far less. And who knows what way the league table will look by the first week in January.

Even Roberto Mancini at City must see the bottomless well of money available to him in other ways. It’s a blessing but it’s also enough rope to hang himself with. Can he entertain Edin Dzeko in the parlour without there being some furious knocking on the door from the jilted Mr Emmanuel Adebayor. Suppose Roberto gains a Dzeko but in the summer transfer window a biblical plague of homesickness and agent greed force him to lose a Tevez, a Balotelli and an Adebayor. What profit a man in that case?

Dzeko is interesting in the way that flavours of the month are interesting. They say on Gaelic football teams that the more league matches you miss in the spring the better your reputation gets. With the window the best striker likely to be available on the market assumes the status of legend. Although most of us had never heard of him before he became Heathcliff to Mancini’s Kathy is thrilling headline fodder. Window 101 stuff though.

There are other levels we may aspire to. The transfer window and the swarms of rumours it admits fill space for an entire month without journalists risking hyperthermia and allow for all manner of study and diversion. On one level the window is an educational tool requiring students of the window to learn the name of and a few basic facts about the latest journeyman/superstar linked with your club or with a big money deal.

On another level the window is a learning instrument for those keeping an eye on the future of world football. I love those lists of young players to watch, lads most likely to succeed and boys who are deemed a bit special. Especially at this time of year when new names come bubbling up having impressed at the summer’s underage tournaments and progressed to first team football sometime before Christmas.

On New Years Eve I actually found myself muting the Hootenanny and counting down to the moment where Goal.com would release their Hot 100 list of young players for the year ahead. The list threw up paydirt straight away, Manchester City have apparently been making come hither eyes at one Frank Acheampong of Ghana who only turned 17 in October. As is mandatory, he is compared with Messi in everything he does but more excitingly he plays for a club called King Faisal Babies.

Some 53 different countries have names mentioned in the list and, worryingly, not one of them is Irish, though surely we missed a trick with Liverpool’s Conor Coady and Ipswich’s Connor Wickham. It’s interesting when looking through the list to recall the lamenting of the English football community after the failures of the summer and to examine the names listed in Goal.com’s list. Of the five English lads listed, only Phil Jones at Blackburn and Josh McEachran, who has a handful of appearances at Chelsea, seem in any way advanced in their senior careers.

Wickham and Alex Chamberlain are in that limbo outside the Premier League playing with Ipswich and Southampton and waiting for the transfers which will determine whether they actually have the talent or not. Coady at Liverpool won’t see action while the atmosphere at Anfield is so fraught. The teams that contested the World Cup semi-finals have more to come however. The German team whose youth and adventure brought such fizz to the tournament has a multitude of options to pitch from through academies like Bayern Munich’s and Stuttgart’s. Mario Goetze of Dortmund has already been handed full international recognition.

In Spain, without naming comparatively established youngsters like Bojan Krkic, Barca’s 20-year-old genius or Sergio Canales (19) at Real Madrid, the list comes up with seven names we’ll soon be conjuring with. From Thiago Alcantara, a target of Bolton and Manchester United by all accounts to Juanmi who at 17 years of age in September became the youngest player to ever score two goals in a La Liga game. Among other names emerging in Holland is the precocious Luc Castaignos while Uruguay’s astonishing tradition (their population is smaller than ours) looks safe with the four stars rising.

You read through the list and marvel at how often Arsenal are linked with, have run the eye over or have attempted to or have just signed decent players like Ryo Miyaichi of Japan to Samuel Galindo of Bolivia. Surely King Faisel Babies could be signed up as a nursery club?