We Play Chess Not Checkers
There have been large doses of confusion and cynicism as to how a certain transfer can be done when everything visible paints a different picture. How can the media not know? Why would other clubs protect our transfer dealings? If a contract is signed and the deal agreed, where is the player? It doesn’t make sense; it seems so ridiculous and far-fetched.
What if I told you we couldn’t announce this fabulous new player of ours because we wanted to wrap-up a deal for a major rivals’ best player? Would that make sense? Would you agree in order to pull off such a coup that we’d need to look weak and incompetent; that we’d need to look like the least dangerous destination for our rivals to send their best player? Because that’s the big picture. That’s why certain parties fed the media propaganda that made the mind boggle. That is why a wily old fox masqueraded as a senile old man for months; repeatedly saying “We have a strong team and may only add a couple of players”, even when we clearly needed to strengthen. That is why we called up youth players to fill out the team for a serious Champions League fixture instead of buying the star players the fans were crying out for.
The truth is, even though they’ve denied it, the rival team wanted to sell their player, but whilst he was happy to leave, he wouldn’t move abroad and he wouldn’t join a team outside the top four in the Premier League. So even though his fate was always sealed, the rival club had to do the unthinkable and sell to one of their rivals. Now, this situation gave us an incredible window of opportunity, but for us to make everyone green with envy by signing this princely rival, we’d have to look like the weakest opposition to our rivals’ domestic ambitions in the top four, but a signing such as our fabulous new player, would strengthen us immeasurably and blur the line between ourselves and our top four rivals.
Our plan to get around this issue was to quietly stack everything in our favour and then play possum. We had no choice. The paperwork for the transfer couldn’t be processed by either club because it would reveal the transfer to our rival; so whilst everything was agreed and signed, nothing was official and the player remained registered to his old club. From our perspective, it made more sense to give the player a solid pre-season at his old club than to have him hide away and train in secret in London. If we didn’t do that, we knew that our fabulous new signing would jeopardise our chances of procuring the rival player we wanted, because the rival player’s team did not want their player to come back to haunt them and so they would absolutely not sell to a team they thought would threaten their position domestically. And that is why our fabulous new signing has been sitting on ice; why he was overly photographed training with his old team and doing medicals, et cetera; because quite simply, that is what needed to happen to get what we wanted most from this transfer window.
All of that sounds plausible because doing that benefits us, but why would the other club ever do such a thing?
Arsenal make teams enter into a confidentiality agreement when negotiating transfers, so the player’s old team has to, legally, remain quiet and accommodate us until we can announce the deal; they cannot do anything that would reveal the transfer before we reveal the transfer. It’s that simple. On top of that, the old club want to buy a defender with the money from the transfer and can’t afford to buy without the transfer being completed, so it’s in their interest to play along.
Why would I now tell you this?
Well, amidst all of the mayhem, whilst people have lost their minds, ranted like lunatics and complained at every turn, playing possum has proven to have worked far better than anyone could have imagined and now we’re finally at checkmate.
n.b. As hard as it might be to believe all of what I’ve just said, even more unbelievable is that they might actually know what they’re doing at Arsenal after all. We’ll find out after the Fenerbache tie, I’m sure.
Originally Posted by Munchies
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