The transfer market

For years, transfer gossip columns have been Alan Gernon's (author of Retired: What Happens to Footballers When the Game's Up) guilty pleasure. Fed up with the time wasted reading them, he explores how many of these rumours are accurate, planted by agents or simply made up - and how easy is it to plant a transfer story in the UK media. Along the way, he discovers how the market works and how a transfer happens; what a move actually means for a typical player in a world where you could buy more than 315,000 League Two players for the price of Neymar; and that almost 30 per cent of transferred players worldwide are moved between clubs against their wishes. He also uncovers how to become a football agent overnight, and why British players are reluctant to move abroad. He speaks to players about the pressures and real-life effects of a move, and tries to figure out how much the stars of yesteryear would be worth in today's crazy transfer market - where Premier League clubs spent a record GBP1.4 billion in the summer of 2017 alone.