Inside Spurs' seemingly doomed pursuit of Antonio Nusa and the medical 'complications'
The transfer window is set to close, but will there be a sting in the tail?
The January transfer window can be hectic, full of rumour and difficult for clubs, players and journalists.
One deal for a young footballer has shone a unflattering light on how it is viewed and reported on - and I’ll be giving the inside track on that below.
Before then, however, we have our own transfer deadline. 11pm on Thursday may be when the window shuts, but it’s also when the window for our fantastic subscription offer ends. You can get 75% off an annual subscription - that’s a full year’s worth of newsletters for just £10! Sign up here if you haven’t already and receive exclusive insight, analysis and comment that you can’t read elsewhere.
Please read on for this week’s piece and let me know your thoughts.
If there are two things that Tottenham's seemingly doomed pursuit of Antonio Nusa has revealed this week it's that an 18-year-old who has started a handful of matches in Belgium can suddenly become the second coming and that social media has little regard for medical confidentiality.
Football fandom is at its most feverish during a transfer window. Opinions are extreme and often ridiculous and for some supporters the need to sign someone, anybody, just to satisfy that craving for a transfer overrides all common sense.
For instance, during a season there's a call for young academy players to be used, the club's own wonderkids to get their chance to impress. "He's got to be better than Player X or Z surely!" comes the cry. Yet when the transfer window opens, so those young stars in the making are placed back in a drawer somewhere, forgotten about, as calls are made for some new toys - the new Neymar, Messi or Haaland to be signed from anywhere in the world even if that blocks those same young homegrown talents' pathway.
It is the modern age of football and the paradoxes that exist within it. That craving for transfer news has created a whole game within the game. It has made celebrities out of social media users and some journalists who no longer even have to write an article, just simply post a sentence or two on a social media platform.
Try explaining the whole transfer scene today to those who followed the game 10, 20 or 30 years ago, when you would find out when a deal was set to be sealed in the newspaper one morning. Those readers looking at today's version of the game would probably say: "But what about the actual football? Isn't that what it's all about?"
Sometimes is the truthful answer. Nowadays the actual football matches take a backseat to the transfer news when the windows are open. It's very specific to football. For instance, in the NFL in the USA, the news of an American football star moving from one franchise to another comes when the deal is done, or as it is being signed. There is no build-up, no long and drawn-out pursuit. It's just a done deal.
All of which brings us to a certain teenager named Antonio Nusa.
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