IS IT SAFE to talk about football again?

Rather than being dragged into the ever-growing clamour for transfer news – fake or otherwise – that seems to have morphed into a dangerously vacuous cult. 

Everywhere you looked this month, you were assailed by the wailing and gnashing of fans – vapid and superficial fans at any rate – who acted as if the world was ending simply because their club couldn’t borrow more money they hadn’t yet earned to purchase a reserve right-back simply because their cousin-in-law’s next door neighbour told them that their first choice right-back was keen for a move because he wasn’t earning enough money. Or something like that. 

The fact is, the transfer window, just like Fantasy Football – and don’t get me started on that “game” designed for dullards who would rather pore over an imaginary league table instead of playing or watching the beautiful game – is designed to feed unthinking masses as part of their daily diet of bread and circuses. 

Unfortunately under such disgustingly incompetent Tory rule, people are struggling to eat in a cost of living crisis so acute even food banks are struggling for stocks. So, “let’s give them all the ‘fun’ of the circus,” seems to be the mantra. 

The fact is people who devote more than 60 seconds of their day to transfer rumours leave me absolutely cold.

If you are the type of person who is obsessed by transfer rumours then we can never be friends. Although, to be fair, I would say there has to be a strong correlation between these types of people and those who love singing “Sweet Caroline” at sporting events. And I don’t like either. 

I would also reserve a special circle of hell for those who share or propagate early transfer rumours for the January window only hours or days after the August market shuts. 

And while we’re at it, don’t get me started on people who believe transfer rumours to be as inviolably true as the tablets of stone God gave Moses, just because someone who got a vague tip off from a money-grabbing agent said so on Twitter. 

Incidentally, why are clubs being lauded for breaking the £2 billion barrier during the transfer window when so many people can’t afford food and heat in a cost of living crisis that is getting worse by the day?

It’s an obscene amount to be viewed as indicative of the greed among agents and leeches rather than anything to be celebrated. Come the revolution football agents would be the first up against the wall, certainly the ones I’ve had the misfortune to come up against during my time. 

Yes, I do understand a whole cottage industry has grown around the rise of the transfer, real or otherwise – the premise being that everyone loves a new toy – and yes, I do understand that many websites get more clicks in the few weeks when the window is open than they do during the entire football season (bar January of course, when the whole depressing nonsense resumes).

And yes, I do acknowledge that many sane, rational people morph into deadline day succubi desperate for transfer titbits to satisfy their ever-increasing addiction for salacious nonsense, masked as inside information – which in my experience is nothing of the sort. 

However, as former Arsenal CEO Ivan Gazidis once memorably said: “Those who speak, don’t know. Those who know, don’t speak.”

Being obsessed by the transfer window is as tedious as it is distracting and superficial as it is foolish.

If you want to know more about your club go and volunteer at their foundation or community arm. Most clubs have them, even if such worthy schemes are struggling. Not least because club owners and boards spend far more of their budgets on splashing the cash during the transfer window than helping their communities. 

The transfer window? Nah, you’re alright, I’d rather stick pins in my eyes. 

PS I’m off to Old Trafford to cover Manchester United vs Arsenal on Sunday. I’ve been to the majority of games this fixture has provided over the last 40 years, as a fan and more recently as a journalist. (Bar the time I travelled through Nicaragua when Arsenal won the league title in Manchester in 2002, but I digress.) 

I can’t wait for Sunday. There is something special about this fixture. Not least because the world would stop to watch this game when the clash was at its height during Arsene Wenger’s glory years that pitted the Gunners’ urbane Frenchman against the teak-tough Alex Ferguson. 

Those days are long gone, but under the revitalising and nurturing leadership of Mikel Arteta, Arsenal are staging a revival of sorts – five wins from five certainly suggests so. 

And with United showing signs of life once again under new boss Erik ten Hag, who knows, in a few years this fixture might be the pinnacle of English football once again. One thing is for certain, Sunday will be an intriguing match. 

Talking about Old Trafford, I paid my first visit back to the cricket version last week, to take in England’s stirring victory over South Africa in the second Test. I hadn’t been to the ground since June 1997 when I Steve Waugh score a century in his pomp for the Australians during that summer’s Ashes. So much has changed that I barely recognised the old place. But I found the changes to be largely sympathetic, despite their grand old Victorian pavilion being the only building that was still standing 25 years on from my previous visit at a ground I think is as atmospheric as Edgbaston and Headingley. 

What I’m Watching: Sam Mendes’s absolutely outstanding documentary on Ben Stokes. If you watch one thing this weekend make it this programme. Or you could catch up on early football transfer gossip for the January window instead. But then we wouldn’t be friends, would we.