Never mind what TS Eliot said on the subject, July and August are the cruelest months for football supporters. The minority in the Champions League elite are quite happy, their managers and chief executives can while away the summer hours waving wads of new television money at players they fancy from the pyramid of clubs below them. Perhaps not all 88, but right through the Premier League and including a good number of Championship performers.
This is the time of year when season tickets are renewed, when optimism ought to reign. A time when form in pre-season friendlies, or the money-making mini-tours that most leading clubs take on these days, is carefully assessed as if it has any relevance to the real thing getting under way in a few weeks. At this stage of the season every club is level on points, and even newly promoted teams are scanning the fixture lists and mentally picking their matches.
Then you become aware that Chelsea have launched a £20m bid for your 21-year-old England centre-half. A bid turned down out of hand, as it happens, but you suppose Chelsea have a lot more spending money than that and you suspect José Mourinho might be the persistent and persuasive type. Roberto Martínez did completely deny any interest in Jonny Evans, didn’t he? Now you begin to wonder. What can a club like Everton actually do if Chelsea come calling for one of their star players and Manchester City suddenly join the list of James McCarthy’s admirers?
Nothing, is the short answer. Just as Aston Villa will be powerless to prevent Liverpool picking up their leading goalscorer, and Liverpool themselves could do little about Raheem Sterling fixing himself up with a club with more money and Champions League prospects.
The only course of action for mid-sized clubs whose prize assets turn out to be no more permanent than sandcastles on a beach is to look lower down the food chain and start the whole process again. Liverpool had to surrender Sterling against their will, so they turned for a replacement to a club lower in the table, leaving Villa with the problem of finding someone else to score the goals they need for survival. Tim Sherwood was already in quite a tight spot after that no-show in the FA Cup final spoiled an otherwise encouraging end to last season. Now we can all sit back and see how well or otherwise he spends the best part of £30m.
Should Everton lose John Stones to Chelsea they will doubtless make a tidy profit on a player David Moyes bought for £3m from Barnsley in 2013, and Goodison knows more than most that every player has his price, yet figures in credit ledgers only excite accountants. The defender would have to be replaced, at fairly short notice and by the only manager in the world willing to sign Antolín Alcaraz twice, and Everton supporters would end up feeling shortchanged. Not because the club would fail to negotiate the best possible price but because a star of the future correctly identified and nurtured by a manager working with Everton’s interests at heart will have ended up playing fewer than 50 games for the club.
Such is life, though try asking Barnsley how they felt about losing Stones as an 18-year-old in the first place, or the next Championship/League One club Everton raid for a bright young prospect to take his shirt. There has always been a hierarchy in football: that is what took Kevin Keegan from Scunthorpe to Liverpool, Alan Ball from Blackpool to Everton or, more recently and divisively, Dimitar Berbatov from Spurs to Manchester United and Sterling from Liverpool to City.
It is the way the world works, at least the football world, though one cannot help but feel the Champions League has made the whole edifice even more top heavy. Most of the best players in England are now retained by just four clubs, many not even sure of a game from week to week, with everyone on the outside either waiting for an invite or getting their agent to bang on the door. Given the undeniable standard of football on offer in the Champions League that might be regarded as progress, though clearly it is a pity when all the other clubs in the Premier League can no longer even dream of winning it.
Talk of progress, however, exposes the elephant in the room. Progress in Europe, specifically in the Champions League, has been hard to identify of late. All English clubs were out by the quarter-final stage last season, and because three German teams have reached the final in the last four years to one team from the Premier League – Chelsea – this country has slipped to third in the Uefa coefficient ranking.
Should Italy, currently fourth, overtake England as well, the Premier League would be allowed only three entrants into the Champions League, though for that to happen English teams would have to do consistently badly in the next few years while Italy would have to improve its showing.
Juventus were the only Serie A side to reach the knockout stage last season, even if they did go all the way to the final. There is probably nothing to worry about, given the amount of money the top four are throwing at the problem, though City scooping in Fabian Delph just to bolster their English contingent is another glimpse of the downside.
To the naked eye Delph looks more like an Aston Villa midfielder than a City regular or a player to take the club onwards and upwards in the Champions League. He even admitted as much a few days ago. But money doesn’t talk, it swears, as Bob Dylan nearly said of the summer transfer window. For 88 league clubs, favourite players disappearing at this time of year is a fact of life. Nothing new. Except when City or Chelsea pay £8m for a squad midfielder he often disappears completely.
