Never Mind The Bollocks

"Yes, I WILL be doing this every week."

Close season transfer speculation/gossip/bullshit, for me, reached its zenith in the (probably balmy) summer of 1996. When my peers and I were young enough not to know better and had yet to be infected by pessimism, especially as England had come desperately close to their first final of my lifetime until that ultimate of bastards Andreas Moller snatched away the dream in a way only a bastard of German heritage can.

That was back when life made sense. As long as I had enough money for a couple of Wham or Desperate Dan bars after school, then really, nothing else mattered. Euro ’96 had flashed me a lie, like a coked-up hooker. England 4, The Netherlands 1. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Why show a 12-year-old such things? They should have just piped in reruns of the Moller penalty, or perhaps just his celebration, into schools across the country, as if to assert: “This is the way of things.”

Anyway, that short period between the end of a major tournament and the start of the new season are always the best for transfer action, everyone knows that. Well aware they are operating in that most alluring of shop windows, two or three good matches can secure any player of slightly above average talent a lucrative contract. Perhaps the greatest coup was achieved by El-Hadji Diouf, who forged himself a no-doubt-now-lucrative career off the back of one good game against an ageing France team sans Zidane in 2002, a game now ruefully recognised by all and sundry as the last time he gave a shit about anything.

Back in Euro '96 though, the major benefactors were the Czech lads, whose improbable journey to the final netted Karel Poborsky, Patrick Berger and the best of the lot, Pavel Nedved, nice contracts with some of Europe’s biggest clubs (Manchester United, Liverpool and Lazio, respectively).

Probably the biggest reason the 1996 close season sticks out is the outstanding quality of the cut-price deals struck; among the finest in the Premier League’s history – Patrick Vieira (£3.5m), Franck Leboeuf (£2.5m), Nicolas Anelka (undisclosed, but bugger all), Ole Gunnar Solksjaer (£1.5m), Gianfranco Zola (£4.5m), Gianluca Vialli (free), and Benito Carbone (£3m).

And the beauty of that summer was that no one went mad, spending wise, save for Newcastle, but that was acceptable because they were so scintillating to watch – David Ginola and Les Ferdinand had arrived a year previous, Faustino Asprilla joined him in February ‘96 and Alan Shearer was busy becoming the most expensive player in the world, the first time an English club had smashed the previous record since Jackie Sewell’s switch from Notts County to Sheff Wed in 1951.

And then with the advent of oligarchs and sheikhs, there was the jumping of the shark as clubs stopped spending their own money (or being regulated by how much they were making) and began to really get a feel for spending someone else’s. And as everyone knows from playing Monopoly, the only way to win is go as nuts as possible early in the game and hope that no one else is able to follow suit until it’s too late. Which makes you a) tediously predictable and unoriginal when you do it for the seventeenth consecutive time and b) a total c**t.

Jesus Navas to City? Great. He’ll start about 20 games. £30m for Fernandinho? *shrug* Mourinho in for Cavani for how much? He’ll do well to win the league with only £150m to spend. And let us not forget that poor little Robby Mancini lost his job because he couldn’t sign Robin van Persie to complement his squad, which was of course otherwise assembled for a pittance. Never mind trying to sign anyone else. Gone are the days of snapping up a Jurgen Klinsmann (£2 million); an Eric Cantona (£900,000 to Leeds); an Andreas Moller (no idea).

So as arbitrary as pulling 1996 out of the Magic Spongers fruit bowl is, solace has been sought in the genuinely excellent competition currently taking place in Brazil. Easy to dismiss as yet another quick-and-big-money-making scheme by FIFA (no doubt, of course, it is), what threatened to be a giant stinking onion has turned out to be a rather resplendent apple.

Replacing the thoroughly depressing thought of Monaco, PSG, Man City and Chelsea buying everyone has been a bloody good tournament where even the Italians are pleasingly entertaining. Watching Andrea Pirlo remains a sight for sore eyes – the man is pir-less (very sorry for this); Neymar seems to decide at will when he wants to do something ridiculously good; the Spaniards are adding a ruthlessness to the tiki-taka; and the Japanese, spurred on by a Shinji Kagawa seemingly intent on screaming “SEE, I REALLY AM VERY GOOD”, have been great. The players seem to want it and it shows – the whole thing has been a wonderful antidote to almost overwhelming pessimism surrounding top-flight European football, where the cheque books of a handful are managing to spoil the enjoyment of the many and even sneering at it (traditionally our favourite pastime) becomes tiresome. It certainly bodes well for the World Cup.

It might not be 1996 and there may be nothing in the charts right now as good as Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman, but, mercifully, petro dollars have not taken over the world just yet.