Football is the world’s most-watched and popular sport, and outside of the World Cup the pinnacle is the English Premier League. Right now we’re coming to the end of the mid-season transfer window, where clubs have the opportunity to buy and sell players, and amidst the incessant speculation one of the league’s top managers felt the need to remind the football media that the beautiful game is not, in fact, a videogame.
The moment arrived during a press conference featuring Tottenham Hotspur manager Thomas Frank, a Danish coach whose witty asides are not quite papering over the fact that the club is having a terrible season. Frank took over in June last year from Ange Postecoglou, a garrulously amusing Australian who committed the cardinal sin of winning something with Spurs and was promptly sacked.
Nevertheless the North London club remain one of the biggest around, and one of the players it’s been heavily linked to over this transfer window was Antoine Semenyo. Semenyo instead chose to join Manchester City for £62.5m and, while Tottenham have made other signings, Frank was asked to address losing out on one of the club’s main targets.
Devastating news for armchair Guardiolas everywhere. I don’t want to put words in his mouth here, but it’s likely that Frank’s also thinking about the whole social media ecosystem that now exists around transfers, whereby clubs are linked with around a dozen players for every one they sign, and managers are peppered with questions about every rumour going.
In Football Manager, and I’m simplifying here but not by much, you put in an offer on a player, wait a day or two for a response, and if the offer is accepted begin negotiating a contract with a player, then wait another few days for a yes or no. Obviously in real life there’s much more human complexity to it, such as whether a player wants to uproot their life and family to move to a new city or country. Or, as is likely the case with Semenyo, whether they think they’ll have a better chance of trophies elsewhere.
Frank remains under pressure at Tottenham, with the club 14th in the Premier League, though it has qualified for the last 16 of the Champion’s League. The team has been unlucky at points, and conceded some sickeners: exactly the kind of thing that, if football really was like Football Manager, would’ve had Frank going for more than a few cheeky reloads.
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