QPR concluded a very satisfactory summer transfer window with the signing of Anton Ferdinand on Wednesday evening but narrowly missed out on Chelsea striker Fernando Torres.
How do I know this? Well, I don’t. What I do know though is that it’s very easy for me to sit here and write “LoftforWords sources suggested,” it might be the case. Words like "suggest" and "might" are very important on transfer deadline day.
Let me tell you a bit about the LoftforWords sources who "suggested" this "might" be in the offing. It was actually my other half Lindsey, who once got stuck on a night bus on the Kings Road near Chelsea’s ground because of a sunken manhole cover and was therefore well placed to comment when I asked her through the bathroom door this morning whether or not she could categorically deny QPR had placed a bid for Fernando Torres. She couldn’t (she doesn’t know who he is) and therefore it might be true. She got quite cross about it all actually.
Another thing I know is most of you reading this, as genuine football fans whose connections to the game stretch as far as paying your money once a week and yelling abuse at the referee, cannot say categorically that it’s not true. And therefore it might be.
Welcome to the rules of reporting on transfer deadline day.
Now if I worked for the Evening Standard newspaper, and was playing by the standard rules of reporting on any other day, I probably would have popped into the office this morning and stuck in a call to the Transport for London press office just to clarify something I overheard on the Northern Line from a woman called Jean. Jean was telling her friend Linda that she’d heard from another friend whose husband drives Northern Line trains that they were shutting the High Barnet branch of the line for the whole of October. Jean uses the line everyday apparently and doesn’t know what on earth she’s going to do to get to work.
What we have there is a tip to investigate, nothing more. Having rung the TFL press people I’m pretty confident they would have told me that Jean was actually mistaken – the High Barnet branch of the Northern Line will be closed in October, but only for two weekends to allow a new signal system to be fitted. So if we were having a slow news day and we hadn’t already reported that then maybe I’d stumbled across one of those p15 leads under a “More Misery for Tube Passengers” headline and a “this is the same poxy system they’ve made a hash of on the Jubilee Line you know” scaremongering introductory three paragraphs. Couple of talking heads at East Finchley station, embattled Mayor of London spokesperson saying disruption will be kept to a minimum, picture of Northern Line train with driver looking gormless at a red signal and the job’s a good un.
However under the rules of reporting transfer deadline day what I would have been able to do is walk off the tube and into the office, sit down at my desk and punch out a page one splash with a turn to three under a banner headline of possibly only one word – ‘CHAOS’ or something like that. Suddenly Jean’s mate whose husband is a tube driver becomes a “source within TFL” and Jean herself becomes a city worker fearful she may lose her job with no way of getting to work. I’d have been done for the day by lunchtime and my story would have been completely inaccurate but so what? People like to read stories about the tube and therefore it's ok.
Not sure what I’m going on about? Well allow me to present exhibit A for the prosecution. There follows at the end of this article a list of 38 "news" stories that Sky Sports reported on its website between 9am on Tuesday and the close of the transfer window last night. You’ll quickly spot a running theme I’m sure – i.e. none of them actually happened.
Now I’d like to point out at this point, with lawyers twitching, that it was Viz Magazine that said you could pretend to be a Sky Sports reporter by “standing in a field and making things up” and not LoftforWords. I am not for one moment suggesting that that reporters are simply making this stuff up. Had I written my tube story up in the second way it wouldn't have been made up would it? Just badly sourced and poorly checked.
Nor am I advocating a culture where we all sit quietly on deadline day waiting for the clubs' official websites to put out the official confirmation of deals before they are allowed to be mentioned on sports news channels. After all last night Sky Sports News interviewed Shaun Wright Phillips at 10.30pm talking about how delighted he was to get the deal done at QPR and we had to wait another 30 minutes for the QPR site to follow suit claiming it was an "exclusive" and saying that when SWP had appeared on Sky talking about how he'd just signed the deal he actually hadn't.
I am merely pointing out that were my newspaper to put out editions across two days with 38 stories in it that never happened then I would expect the editor to be asking serious questions about the sources being used and the quality checks each story has to go through. I'm up for a well sourced rumour as much as the next fan, and I'm sure lots of the deals on the list below may have been discussed somewhere at some point. But I'm also sure that a great deal of them were just lines from players' agents trying to drum up interest in their players and were complete works of fiction - I'm looking particularly at the Sulley Muntari and Roman Pvlyuchenko deals mentioned below.
No doubt there's a mutual back scratching thing going on there where news agencies report agent tips like those in exchange for genuinely decent info at other times. But is it ever right to report something you know is probably not true in exchange for something that might be in the future? Would you expect your local newspaper to run a story given to them by the borough council no questions asked in exchange for some genuine news further down the line? And even if Stoke really did ring up and ask Arsenal about Nicklas Bendtner at what point do you report that? Given that it didn't even come close to happening should it be reported at all?
My favourite example of the lack of quality control on stories from the past two days was the suggestion that Stoke City were trying to sign Chelsea striker Romelu Lukaku on loan for the rest of the season. Now I'm not calling for every story to be double sourced and treble checked before it gets an airing but you’ll almost certainly remember that Lukaku signed for Chelsea only last week, and you may have some recollection that there is a rule forbidding such a double move in a single transfer window. It certainly wouldn’t take much checking to clarify that rule – one call to the Premier League press office perhaps or even a thorough Google search would probably turn up what you need to know. But Sky, followed by the BBC and everybody else, reported the Lukaku story straight away. An hour later, when this rule was mentioned, another story was put out saying the move had “fallen through” or “been denied” rather than the journalistic tradition when you put something out that is clearly false – an apology.
I also enjoyed the Sky reporter on the ground at Stoke, surrounded by what can only be described as the dregs of the modern world (not a symmetrical face among them) who said categorically at lunchtime on Wednesday that the club's move for Peter Crouch was off. In the very next report that bloke who looks very much like he died sometime ago and is being propped up by a director while the sound man wiggles his mouth around was up at Sunderland and said quite categorically that Peter Crouch would not be coming to Sunderland because he was going to Stoke instead. One of them was right as it turned out, but it didn't say much for the quality of the first guy's sources and there was a definite feeling of 'throw enough shit at the wall' about the second.
And whenever they did get a manager on screen to give an update and he said something like "we won't be doing any more business today" the reporter would scoff and say "ahh but we all remember what happened with Spurs last deadline day, you never know." What "happened" at Spurs last transfer deadline day was that five minutes before the deadline Sky Sports claimed they'd made an offer for Charlie Adam. The move never happened. Quite why this incident can be used for the rest of time to immediately strike something a manager says that you don't want to hear off as a lie is unclear to me.
But, then, this is only football and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. It’s only a sport, it’s not worth getting het up about. Seeing all those Sky Sports boys with their gratuitous video screens in the studio and gang of moronic chavs loitering round behind the roving reporter in the car park at Tottenham’s training ground is all a bit of fun really, I should take it for what it is. As Jim White said over the Big Ben chimes at 11pm last night: "Some people don't like transfer deadline day, but then unlike us some people don't like excitement in their lives."
Except this summer things have taken a rather sinister turn. You see in amongst the garbage pouring forward on the “live transfer ticker” there are now live odds. You can bet on where Yossi Benayoun is going to go this summer – Liverpool 5/2, Arsenal 7/2, Spurs 4/1 at close of business on Tuesday – with Sky’s own betting service. So now we have a news service that has put out 38 stories over the past 48 hours that have turned out to be wrong and also has an associated profitable betting service that it encourages you to use to gamble on which of them might be true.
Is it just me that feels uncomfortable with this? Create a market with a news story, link a few clubs to a player and get people to bet on it, if he goes nowhere then everybody's a loser. If this was CNBC instead of Sky Sports News, and these were share prices rather than odds responding to one incorrect story after another about purchases and sales, then somebody would very quickly be placed in jail.
This is a concerning progression from sites like Tribal Football and Caught Offside which publish stories with outlandish headlines, such as the one I’ve used here, to draw you into a three line story suggesting that Lionel Messi may be about to arrive at Loftus Road. These stories attract a lot of hits, because people see them on NewsNow and want to see this amazing (completely untrue) piece of news. They then sell advertising space on their site saying “look how many hits we have”. Tuesday's best effort from Caught Offside was QPR’s season long loan offer to Man Utd’s Michael Owen. Complete nonsense, but I bet some of you clicked on it when you saw it. Hell, somebody even linked the bloody thing on our message board - and that’s all they care about.
It may only be football, it may not be that important in the grand scheme of things, but putting out such a high volume of incorrect stories to people who do care a great deal about their clubs and the sport and then either shrugging and saying “things change all the time in football” or worse still not even mentioning the ones that turn out to be false ever again is immoral. Especially so now there are chances for gullible people to bet on it.
Worse still it has spawned a whole load of amateur 'in the know' idiots, each one more desperate than the last to make you believe they have a source somewhere with some fantastic information. They too like to use phrases like "I understand" and "sources suggest" to cover up the fact they know fuck all. We've had our fair share of "Ched Evans is on the bus" and "Danny Graham has just bought a house in Sunbury" nonsense down the years but we are not alone. Manchester Airport reports 357 separate sightings of Wesley Sneijder this summer Tweeted by people who, presumably, get a kick out of lying to people.
The only thing more mystifying than the people who want to Tweet sightings of footballers at service stations that didn't actually happen, is the people who lap it up and want to read it. If you've sat enchanted by Sky Sports News over the past 48 hours, then you'll probably recognise some of the following.
Peter Crouch definitely staying with Spurs. (He went to Stoke)
Peter Crouch signing for Sunderland for £10m. (He went to Stoke)
Tottenham to complete signing of Gary Cahill from Bolton with Sebastien Bassong going the other way. (Both stayed put).
Sebastien Bassong to join QPR. (Stayed put).
Charlton, Notts County and Millwall battling to sign Mark Marshall from Barnet. (Stayed put)
Sulley Muntari to leave Inter Milan and join Newcastle. (Stayed put).
Sulley Muntari to leave Inter Milan and join Fulham. (Stayed put).
Sulley Muntari to leave Inter Milan and join Spurs. (Stayed put).
Charlton striker Paul Benson set for either Bournemouth or Bradford. (Joined neither).
Tottenham and Liverpool in for Yossi Benayoun from Chelsea. (Joined Arsenal)
Stoke to sign Nicklas Bendtner from Arsenal. (Joined Sunderland)
Blackpool to loan Nile Ranger from Newcastle. (Never happened)
Fulham, West Ham and QPR all fighting to sign Jerome Thomas from West Brom. (Went nowhere)
Peterborough are leading the chase for Norwich striker Cody McDonald. (Wrong). Closely followed by Coventry are leading the chase to sign Cody McDonald which was true.
Liverpool's David Ngog rejects a move to Leicester and might sign for Blackburn instead. (Went to Bolton)
Sunderland to 'push through' a deal for Wolfsburg's Patrick Helmes before the window closes. (Presumably they didn't push hard enough)
Aston Villa make deadline day swoop for Middlesbrough's Rhys Williams. (Never happened)
Newcastle, right up to 10.30pm on Wednesday, about to sign Bryan Ruiz. (Went to Fulham for £12m)
Fulham to sign Ghana ace Derek Boateng from Dnipro Sky Sports understands. (Or misunderstands)
Daniel Sturridge to Liverpool. (No)
Southampton to push for Jay Rodriguez from Burnley. (Again, push harder)
Craig Bellamy to Stoke. (Went to Liverpool)
Cameron Jerome from Birmingham to Leicester. (Maybe they confused him with Bellamy)
Jermaine Jenas from Spurs to QPR. (Went to Villa)
Stephen Dobbie to swap Swansea for Blackpool. (Stayed put)
Jan Beausejour to join Wigan from Birmingham. (Never happened)
Aston Villa to sign Joe Cole from Liverpool. (Went to Lille)
Craig Bellamy to join QPR from Man City. (Went to Liverpool).
Roman Pavlyuchenko to leave Spurs for Porto. (Stayed put)
Gary Hooper from Celtic to Wolves. (Never happened)
Andre-Pierre Gignac to Fulham. Or Blackburn. Or Everton. (Or nowhere)
Birmingham close to a deal for Newcastle's Nile Ranger. (A second attempt after the earlier Blackpool story, still wrong)
Brighton and Coventry both close to deals for Leeds' Billy Paynter. (You'd think the way Leeds get rid of players this would be like shooting fish in a barrel, alas...)
Alvaro Pereira from Porto to Chelsea. (No)
Liam Ridgwell and Nicky Shorey to Celtic. (Wrong)
Ok, Liam Ridgwell to Newcastle then. (Still wrong)
Kaka from Real Madrid to Spurs. (Not even worth dignifying with a response)
Adam Johnson from Man City to Stoke. (Likewise).
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