This is a story that starts, in a manner of speaking, with an astonishing scoring spree in Swindon more than half a century ago. After 13 games of the 1965-66 season the Robins were toiling in the middle of what was then called the Third Division and particularly underwhelming in attack, where they averaged precisely one goal per game, the second-worst record in the league. And then, suddenly, everything changed.
To say they clicked would be to massively downplay what happened next, a transformation so extraordinary it would have Clark Kent demanding a smarter outfit and a better phone box. In their next five home games Swindon ran riot, scoring 25 times, before abruptly returning to normal once again.
York were thrashed 6-0 on 19 October, Peterborough beaten 3-0 four days later, and the next visitors, Reading, suffered a 5-0 hiding. The No9, Jimmy Lawton, was in top form while Don Rogers, who scored once against Posh and hat-tricks in the other two games, was irrepressible. When Lawton strained a hamstring a day before the visit of Merthyr Tydfil in the first round of the FA Cup in November they were forced to change their front line, but the young reserve Keith East turned out to be better still. Thrown into the team at short notice he scored four times in a 5-1 win, and then proved it wasn’t a fluke when, during the visit of Mansfield the next week, he managed five. Lawton did not play again until April, by which time East had 24 goals to his name.
It was the kind of achievement that always attracts interest in a young player, and towards the start of the following season top-flight Fulham moved in, only to move out again when Swindon increased their asking price at the last minute. Player and club fell out and in the end East went north, to Stockport County, who were on an ultimately successful title-winning charge in the Fourth Division. “Keith East, a 22-year-old Swindon Town centre-forward, was transferred yesterday to Stockport County at an undisclosed fee,” the Guardian reported. “East has played nine times for the first team this season and scored twice.”
It was the first time the Guardian had ever reported a transfer being concluded for an undisclosed fee. (The Times first applied the phrase to Harry Hood’s move from Clyde to Celtic in 1969. The Mirror did not use it in the context of football until 1973, and that was in announcing Jimmy Hill’s switch from ITV to the BBC. “You can say I’ll be earning a few bob more than Malcolm Allison at the Palace, and they say he’s on thirteen grand a year,” was all the information the pundit would provide.)
Times have changed. Between them the Guardian and the Observer reported 22 undisclosed fees in the 70s, 24 in the 80s, 61 in the 90s and 195 in the 2000s, and still the number rises. The Premier League’s own list of deals completed so far this summer involving its clubs contains 13 signings for specific sums, 26 free transfers, 74 loans and 116 undisclosed fees.
It is not hard to see the attraction of this financial secrecy, when the sums swilling around the English top flight are so gallingly stratospheric. Premier League clubs spent £859m in the summer 2015 transfer window, up from £835m in 2014 and £631m in 2013. Each September following the window’s closure the sum is announced by television hosts pointing excitedly at blinking totalisers, a bit like Children in Need only without the children or the need. Soon, though, this will have to stop: it is harder to get excited about a question mark, however large we believe the number hiding behind it to be.
The sport has discovered a taste for secrecy. Having successfully hidden their finances, footballers started hiding their faces, covering their mouths with their hands before they talk to each other in public. Whether on a beach in Dubai or a pitch in Manchester it seems they can only relax when there’s a palm between them and the nearest camera.
Some filmed conversations later prove problematic – just ask John Terry. Roger Lemerre and Didier Deschamps had a lengthy discussion on the pitch after the Euro 2000 final, prompting a French TV station to hire lip-readers and discover the national team captain’s intention to retire – “I’m tired, so tired. I have a wife, a family, I don’t want to make them suffer” – and the coach’s desperation to stop him, which must have been irritating.
But there are two sides to this coin, with TV footage having been used on several occasions by footballers and their managers to defend themselves against charges of using offensive language. This, to be fair, isn’t always totally successful: though the lip-reader hired by Arsenal’s Patrick Vieira in 2002 convinced a disciplinary panel that he did not, as alleged, call the referee Andy D’Urso “a fucking wanker with no personality”, they decided the only one of those words he hadn’t used was the second and still gave him a two-match ban and a £25,000 fine.
So here we are. Every week millions of people, in person and on television, pay to watch the beneficiaries of undisclosed transfers have undisclosed conversations. But this is a road that leads to a dark and distrustful place, where teams play mystery matches against obscure opponents on private pitches, and the phrase “classified results” takes on a different meaning entirely. Secrets are convenient but they are corrosive; a sport forever in the spotlight might wish we sometimes looked the other way, but every time they force us to do so some of us will decide not to turn back.
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