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With all the fuss over Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid isn’t it time to rethink the way the transfer market works?

Real have obviously sounded out the player and his agent before launching their Marca led media offensive for the player. Ronaldo, if he wanted, could kill the whole thing stone dead by categorically committing his future, for next season at least, to United. He has failed to do so and the whole thing rumbles on. United’s ire is understandable but Ferguson can hardly claim the higher ground on this one with cases like Stam and van Nistelrooy under his belt.

But what Madrid are doing is no different to what clubs all across Europe are doing right now. Agents are being contacted to see if their player would be agreeable to a move to a certain club, perhaps certain things will be offered, and then the club will approach the player’s club to make an offer. It’s just on a smaller scale.

We’ve seen high profile cases in the past - Patrick Vieira courted constantly by Real Madrid, Thierry Henry by Barcelona, Steven Gerrard by Chelsea and so on. Clubs talk about reporting the offenders to FIFA but nothing is ever done. Things continue the same way all the time.

So what can we do about it? Either accept this is the way things work or implement new measures to try and give clubs some control over the players. With the Bosman rule and the Webster clause the transfer market is going through a serious upheaval. No longer can a club say ‘You’re under contract, you’re not leaving’, as players can now buy out their deals. At some point a high profile Webster case will happen and that will open the floodgates.

The behaviour of agents won’t change, they’ll still strive to make as much money as possible for their client (and themselves), often at the expense of the footballing side of a player’s career. Kudos to the agent of Steve Sidwell who ensured his client got a £52,000 a week deal at Chelsea last summer. But then a player who was being spoken about as a possible international started only a handful of games and his career has gone backwards while he’s gotten richer.

I’m not quite sure what the point I’m trying to make is. It might be that the transfer market is fucked up anyway and there’s not much we can do to fix it. Unless clubs have real evidence that their player has been tapped up, and that would require the player and his agent to confirm it as the other club certainly won’t, nothing can be done about it.

Is there any way to make agents behave like decent people? Is there any way of stopping a player wanting to leave a club when he’s being offered three times as much money elsewhere? Is loyalty a thing of the past or does it require purchasing these days?

Your thoughts are very welcome.

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You have to admire Rafa Benitez. Peter Crouch hardly gets a look in all season, the manager preferring to play the hard working but goal shy Kuyt ahead of him and deciding he’ll keep the frankly rubbish Voronin over him, yet there’s a £15m price tag slapped on his head.

Amazing. Crouch is a decent Premier League player but how can he justify asking for that kind of money when, if he really was a £15m player, he’d surely have played more games this season?

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No sooner had they bought him from Preston there were stories that they were willing to sell him. Now it looks like he’s off to Ipswich on loan after barely making an appearance all season.

Did Redknapp buy him based on the newspaper hype? It wasn’t cheap either, £6m. To put that in perspective that’s as much as Arsenal paid for Tomas Rosicky, an established international of proven quality.

We know English players are overpriced but this has to go down as one of the strangest deals of all time. Any Pompey fans have an insight into this one?

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It’s nice when a player is honest about why he joined a club. Sometimes it’s because it’s a big, important club. Sometimes it’s because he wants to work with a particular manager. Most of the time it’s about money. Which is exactly the case with Benjani who moved from Portsmouth to Man City.

Speaking about his controversial post-deadline day move, he says:

It was tough to leave Portsmouth and I was late leaving my home for Manchester because I kept asking myself all day whether this was all true. I kept telling myself it was all a bad dream and I would wake up the following day and still be a Pompey player. But this was not a dream.

But when I looked at the contract they were offering, I couldn’t believe it and I just signed there and then.

And his honesty is refreshing. It’s like Alberto Luque who joined Newcastle from Deportivo la Coruña. He wasn’t particularly interested in the move but confided to some of his international colleagues that the money on offer from Newcastle, in the region of £52,000 a week when he had been on around €9,000 at Depor, was just too good to turn down.

He couldn’t believe the amount of money he was being offered and it was that which made him swap the sunnier climes of Spain for the less sunny North East of England.

At least Newcastle got good value for their money…

Oh.

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You are Carlos Puyol. You are a Catalan boy now captain of that great symbol of Catalunya, FC Barcelona.

You have won league titles, the Champions League, you play with such great players as Thuram, Zambrotta, Ronaldinho, Henry, Eto’o, Deco, Xavi and Messi, plus incredible youngsters like Dos Santos and Bojan. Your team, the one that you captain, plays football that draws praise from all corners of the globe.

Do you then, for one second, consider a move to Spurs? Bearing in mind that they haven’t won a league title in over 40 years, have never played in the Champions League let alone won it, that their only success in recent years (and recent is pushing it) is a League Cup in 1999 and that you’ll swap playing with the greats to line up alongside the likes of Darren Bent, Ricardo Rocha, Michael Dawson, Younes Kaboul, Tom Huddlestone, Teemu Tainio and Paul Robinson.

I think Tottenham can want to sign Puyol all they want but it’s the same as any of us wanting to get busy with Angelina Jolie. It’s just never going to happen.

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…and it doesn’t look like he’s going to be inviting John Terry around for tea anytime soon either.

The damage has been big in the dressing room because we know now what happened and who caused Mourinho’s departure. Nothing can stop me from leaving now.

Or is it Shevchenko? Or is it John Terry who took umbrage at Mourinho’s questioning of his injury troubles?

Either way it’s hilarious.

Update: The Sun carries more from the France Football interview and it really is no holds barred. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player quite so scathing about his current employers.

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This is bollocks. Barcelona, along with Real Madrid are for some reason allowed to do what the bloody hell they like when it comes to (allegedly, of course) tapping up and tempting players away from other clubs. What Arsenal did, or more likely what the player and his agent did was not 100% above board but pales into nothing when compared with the conduct of the Spanish giants. Did Arsenal really give Real permission to speak to Fabregas in the summer? After agreeing to sell the prize asset of Henry, to follow that up with the sale of arguably their best player would test the patience of even the most ardent supporter of Wenger.

The case of Obi Wan Mikel has a similar ring to it, and lo and behold a club with a bigger chequebook than its moral fabric is involved. Here, the player was the one who appeared to instigate the move (probably along with an agent/financial advisor, let’s face it), but the similarities are there. Contracts are worth next to bugger all these days; the Bosman ruling changed the way transfers are done and the massive influx of money has distorted the market even further.

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There comes a point, where the fun is taken out of transfer speculation, and frankly, this summer it has been reached. When papers that sell by the million are prepared to employ ‘journalists’ that rely on blogs for their information and don’t bother to check any facts, as in the Palacio to Arsenal affair, and as Gunnerblog shows today, they can claim a player was on trial at a club, when a cursory look at the facts would have seen he was actually playing for his club on the day in question, you have to wonder why these cretins carry on writing.

If I said something on a Monday, that turned out to be utterly untrue on a Tuesday, and it could be shown that I had got financial gain from it, I would expect to be prosecuted for fraud, yet the brain-dead morons who write the sports pages of the tabloids, lie to us day after day, with no other aim in mind, but driving sales of their vile rags.

To be fair, it’s not just the tabloids. From personal experience, I know that The Times makes stories up, even taking quotes given to another paper, then putting different questions in front of them, in order to distort the orignal meaning! The Guardian has printed reviews of concerts that bore little relation to the performance given, and when I called them on it, I got no reply.

I think it’s time that we all called their bluff. Whenever some fuckwit says “Player X will sign for Team Y tomorrow” and they don’t, we should all write in and ask what they were talking about. Who were their sources, were they double checked or verified in any way at all? Let’s try and get the truth back into sports journalism, and if that means slightly fewer pages of fact-free drivel written by educationally sub-normal troglodytes, then so be it.

Pass on the word.

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I want to ask the Premier League why it was so difficult for Liverpool to sign Javier Mascherano, when we had to wait a long time for the paperwork, but it was so easy for Carlos Tevez to join Manchester United? - Source.

Was it just me who had the tits bored off them all summer by the Tevez to United saga then? The threats of High Court action and FIFA intervention were just figments of my imagination, I suppose. The weeks and weeks of stories, denials of this that and the other didn’t happen.

And Mascherano joined Liverpool contrary to a FIFA ruling which says a player cannot play for more than 2 clubs in any 12 month period.

What the hell is Benitez on about? His ire at Man United for not wanting to sell them Heinze is weird as well. Surely if United don’t want to sell him to Liverpool they’re under no obligation to do so.

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…this summer’s already loopy transfer market can’t get any more unhinged there comes news that Craig Gordon might move from Hearts to Sunderland for £9m.

Yes, really. £9m. Of course nothing has been finalised but even talking about Craig Gordon as a £9m player is ludicrous. From what I’ve seen he’s an above average young keeper who has the potential to be a pretty good player. If I was spending £9m on a keeper I’d be wanting established, proven quality.

Hearts and that crazy bloke who owns the club and who’s not a gangster or anything must be having a right laugh at all this.

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