EARLIER this month Fifa released its latest International Transfer Snapshot, revealing record levels of transfer spending of $7.36 billion (£5.9bn) in men’s football this summer.

The huge amounts of money spent on transfers, and by extension agents' fees, which accounted for 9.5 per cent of the total transfer spend during this period, raises questions about how clubs are run and how football’s culture of transfers is spiralling out of control.

The report covers the 2023 mid-year transfer period from June 1 to September 1, which includes European and English football’s summer transfer window.

It shows transfer spending is back on the rise following the previous record of $5.8bn (£4.6bn) in 2019, suggesting football clubs have fully recovered from the lull in spending during Covid-19 and immediately after.

Recent transfer windows and the associated spending are fuelled by a number of things, but now more than ever the media is playing a part.

Unprecedented coverage, from reporting on every step of a transfer as it happens to post-transfer deep dives on how a club signed a player, has turned what was once just part of the game into a distinct phenomenon all of its own.

Transfer gossip and an interest in the transfer market are not new. For years the BBC’s daily transfer gossip page has been one of the most popular on its website.

Prior to the growth of the internet, transfer rumours would regularly be posted in the morning papers, also providing a second story for the next day either confirming or rubbishing a previous rumour.

Ceefax and Teletext acted as a precursor to the way we currently consume transfer gossip, compiling all the latest news on one page, often with multiple sub-pages. It was free for everyone to read without having to buy a newspaper.

At that stage, it was still pretty much the basic information about a transfer or news story. There was little to no embellishment or promotion: it was just the information the reader required.

As web pages replaced Ceefax and Teletext, and as social media became the ideal medium for those sentence-long transfer snippets and rumours, free for all to read globally, these media have increasingly become part of the transfer ecosystem.

Huge social media accounts can also be an extension of the influence of agents as a promotional tool where players, clubs, and agents exchange information with a promise of future stories or exclusives.

Agents can bypass clubs and traditional media and go straight to the transfer journalists, with their huge following ranging from thousands to millions. This happens often to the annoyance of clubs for whom, in certain situations, it can be better if these things remain private.

But clubs can use it to their advantage too. Many transfer rumours now come across as adverts.

It can be a club trying to get a player off their books to raise funds for other signings, or an agent and player looking for the next signing on fee.

A sentence of information on a transfer is now a classified ad, with a bigger audience than ever before.

In some cases, a less-established reporter with a smaller following might stumble upon a transfer story but be asked to hold off by the agent until one of the more established transfer outlets has released the exclusive to their massive audience.

Should the less-established reporter turn this down and go rogue with their exclusive, access to future stories via this particular source may be more difficult to come by.

From the point of view of the clubs, the media involvement in transfers might be able to help them if they are looking to offload a player.

On the other hand, if a club’s transfer target becomes public, the agent and selling club can use the media to alert others and create a bidding war.

Well-run clubs tend to do most of their business under the radar, while well-run clubs shouldn’t need to embark on massive net spending in each transfer window.

A practical turnover of players shouldn’t lead to huge sums being spent every year, and the most well-organised clubs should be able to constantly rebuild in a sensible manner, somewhat detached from the transfer window frenzy.

Of course, many teams with rich owners worked their way into a position where they can be more sensible through large amounts of initial spending. Once they have bought their way into such a position, players leaving from the youth academy or first-team now help to fund incomings that fine-tune their squad.

Another increasingly uncomfortable aspect of this culture of transfers is the dehumanisation of players. It is common to see players spoken of merely as transfer fees, assets, or in terms of the data they produce during games.

It is a worrying development that removes much of the human aspect from football. Players are an amount of money, an xG score, an investment, a distance-run measurement, a potential sell-on fee.

The transfer frenzy creates a fleeting brand for a player for the period they are part of the rumour mill, pushed out on social media to millions of readers along with carefully packaged and promoted skills videos and highlight reels.

Then when they arrive at a club and start playing games, they become targets: judged on their fee or performance at another club in a different environment to the one in which they've arrived, judged on their best-of video. Why they aren’t doing that at the new club?

Chelsea are the obvious example of such antics. Since Todd Boehly and Clearlake took ownership of the club following the departure of Roman Abramovich, no club has spent more.

In the last two seasons, calculations on the player database website Transfermarkt have Chelsea’s total transfer spend at over £1bn, more than double the next highest spenders, Paris St Germain.

Only the PIF-owned Saudi Arabian clubs Al-Ahli and Al-Hilal ended the 2023 summer transfer window with a higher net spend.

This approach hasn’t brought success so far, either. Last season Chelsea finished in their lowest league position since 1994, way off the Champions League places in 12th.

The poor performance of some of the big spending teams raises questions as to the benefits of this approach.

Are teams going out and finding the type of players they want, who fit roles at their club, or are they being presented with players by the same small group of agents and then choosing from their lists?

It seems some clubs are signing players just to look competitive in the market rather than signing players in order to be competitive on the pitch.

The game of transfers is now fuelled by marketing, PR and media coverage — and not by what a football team might need to improve their team or by what a player might need to improve their life as a footballer.

In an environment where workers’ — players' — contracts are being bought and sold for record-breaking sums of money, these players now need unions more than they need agents.

Let the buyer beware; but let the players beware, too, lest they become pawns in this game which now has little to do with association football.