Transfer window checklist

 4. A journalist attempting to boost his followers on Twitter with an impending exclusive – People love Twitter. I know I do. But journalists don’t, especially when they’re being contradicted by a player they’ve just written a nonsense story about, instantly rendering their status as the “in the know” middle man redundant and faintly pathetic.

What journalists do love though is breaking exclusives, even if they haven’t got one. At various points in the next week, some hack or other will attempt to drum up some free publicity for whatever drivel he’s written by announcing a disingenuous and misleading exclusive reveal at a specific time in the near future.

This will begin with something along the lines of “Big news on Sneijder, will tell all at 6” only to eventually reveal that he’s dropped a Cornetto on his wife’s favorite shoes or momentarily put a cat in a bin. This will inevitably lead to a barrage of abuse, but not before he’s boosted his online following exponentially amongst the army of gullible idiots who followed him to get the exclusive on his exclusive.

This ploy can also be used to drum up excitement around some actual but uninteresting or obvious transfer news, such as “Big development re:Arsenal, full story at 4” – “Wenger says he’s happy with his squad if he doesn’t sign anyone.”Luckily there’s a simple tactic to figuring out this crafty ruse and avoiding the inevitable let down – Don’t be an idiot.

Probability of journalists disingenuously telegraphing their own uninteresting invented stories – 9

5. Someone burning their shirt – Nothing confuses wives, girlfriends or the uninitiated more than the strange fixation overweight middle aged men have with garish figure hugging polyester sports clothing intended for young, lean athletes. In any other context such an obsession would be madness, bordering on the grotesque, but in football it symbolises the passion, intensity, depth of feeling and the levels of self flagellation one is willing to go to for ones beloved club.

However sometimes a shirt can come to embody all the contemptible, disloyal, traitorish aspects of the game, especially if it’s emblazoned with the name of a recently departed player, and in such cases, it must pay. With fire!

No transfer window would be complete without the sight of a disproportionately angry fan taking to the streets (preferably behind a reporter standing in front of something) to display his raging primitive anger in the only tangible way he knows how. By burning a £50 carcinogenic shirt in the open air in front of television cameras.

Some would say that burning your own club shirt is counterproductively burning your own crest with it, but such people clearly don’t appreciate just how cool fire is. Probability of someone burning their shirt – 7

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