Column
Culture
Football
Sport
4 min read

Football transfers are just cheat codes to success

Not every problem in the game, or life, can be fixed overnight.
TV presenters stand eith side of a large screen showing football team badges.
Pundits prognosticate.
Sky Sports.

A couple of years ago I bought a Nintendo Switch and waved goodbye to my productivity. I’ve recently been playing Balatro, the breakout indie success of 2024 that is essentially the lovechild of poker and heroin, it’s that addictive. I now dream in playing cards. It’s a miracle this column managed to get done, frankly.  

However, as all-consuming as Balatro is, one game I simply can’t allow myself to play again is Football Manager. I know that, if I do, the next few months of my life will be a blur as I try to make my team that little bit better.  

It’s not that I especially love tweaking tactics or managing a team of plucky underdogs. No, for me, Football Manager may as well be player transfer window simulator punctuated unhappily by the occasional season of actual football. 

Like most football fans, I love transfers. Sometimes more than I like actual football. As the January transfer window opens, I’ve found myself wondering why this is. The January window is normally a slow one, with little happening. Clubs challenging for titles and trophies, or scrapping to avoid relegation, (or, in Manchester City’s case, somehow both?) are generally unwilling to sell important players mid-season (FAO: Trent Alexander-Arnold and Real Madrid). 

And yet. If you are one of those clubs pushing for a title, or desperately fighting to stay up, a new signing or two can be just what’s needed.  

Transfers are, of course, never guaranteed to succeed. Antony (£85 million), Paul Pogba (£89 million), and Nicolas Pépé (£72 million) should put that discussion to bed. But it’s hard to argue with the results sometimes. Liverpool sign Van Dijk, Salah, and Alisson and go from bridesmaid to bride almost overnight. Nottingham Forest is promoted and decide to buy Literally Every Footballer in the World (okay, 31 players, but still that’s basically a whole academy). They currently sit level on points with Arsenal.  

Transfers are all potential, and potential is always exciting. The grass is always greener. The next transfer might just be the one to take your team to that next level. 

But football’s obsession with transfers also speaks to the tempo of modern life and our need to slow down. 

We have become somewhat incapable of thinking long-term or living slowly. I don’t think it’s as simple as our attention span decreasing. The thought of watching a three-hour film seems completely impossible to me, but I would very happily watch episodes of Brooklyn 99 for about 5 hours straight, given the chance. It’s almost as though I have to micro-dose content now (yes, hello again, Balatro).  

And so it is in football, too. Fans want success now, not next season. And in this context transfers become the cheat code to success. 

Does your team struggle to score goals? Transfer. 

Is your team incapable of keeping a clean sheet? Transfer. 

Does your life generally feel meaningless and devoid of purpose? Transfer.  

The solution very rarely seems to be, you know, better coaching or better tactics. It’s always transfers. Transfers are simply the micro-dosing of the footballing world and speak, a quick hit with the promise of instant result. 

 

Not every footballing problem can be fixed with a transfer or a sacking. Not every cultural or social problem can be fixed overnight or without pain. 

Of course, we don’t just see this in transfers: manager turnover is a symptom of the same phenomenon. Want an instant improvement outside of a transfer window? Sack the manager. The speed with which a manager’ status can change from being the Second-Coming-of-Christ to drive-him-out-with-pitchforks is alarming. Ange Postecoglou at Spurs sometimes gets both in the same week. 

But the most successful managers in Premier League history – Ferguson, Wenger, Guardiola, Klopp – were all ones who were afforded time. Even when the case could be made for them being sacked. By contrast, Watford have had more managers than the Catholic Church has had Popes and look where that’s got them.  

Like so much of society, football is enraptured with a short-term, win-now approach to the sport. But humans are not built to live at this tempo constantly. They are built for rest, and for ebb-and-flow.  

 Not every footballing problem can be fixed with a transfer or a sacking. Not every cultural or social problem can be fixed overnight or without pain.  

Society is often reticent to learn anything from football. But footballing success shows us that short-term quick-fix solutions can only go so far. The promise of transfers is often a false one. True stability and true flourishing come from slow thought and long-term work.  

We are creatures, made to live in time. No good comes from trying to cheat this basic fact of human existence.  

Right. Time for Balatro.  

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Article
America
Culture
Politics
3 min read

God goes public: the inauguration and the return of faith-talk

This Inauguration Day, Jack Chisnall explains why the 'Church and State' separation just can't hold.
The 47th President of the United States of America

Inauguration Day. Donald Trump again makes an oath to defend and uphold, as best he can, the Constitution of the United States. It has always been a fairly swift-moving bit of public pomp - swift compared to coronations at any rate, which typically take hours just to put a crown on a royal head. The Presidential inauguration can take as little as six minutes, and viewers get more bang for their buck: the President is confirmed not only as the head of the ruling government, but the representational head of state too.

It’s all a good lesson in the ‘separation of Church and State’ some will opine. Forget the medieval-sounding solemnities and pageantry, and Archbishops intoning things over altars. Here, a man in a suit enters a civic covenant with the people who have democratically elected him. Before President Jackson’s escort was swamped by 20,000 spectators in 1829 and security protocol had to cordon off spectators, the first inaugurations had a humble, almost mundane aspect: the new president would go about to shake hands with citizens who had popped along to see the ceremony, and to wish the new guy “good luck”. Sources show that Abraham Lincoln shook over 5,000 hands when he was inaugurated for a second time in 1865.

But such well-worn narratives - of humankind progressing from strange, religious druidry to sane, reasonable democracy - are looking creakier than ever, in 2025. Such views were all the rage in the 20th century. But the West is having a fundamental rethink about what exactly it would mean for humans to ‘de-anchor’ themselves from a religious way of being. We have learnt by now - the hard way - that we merely swap one form of worship for another in supposedly ‘irreligious’ societies.

In the first place, the ‘separation of church and state’ history is not as simple as all that. While it’s true that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution did not establish a church on the national level, as in England, there were plenty established at the state level just fine. Connecticut was Congregationalist until as late as 1818 - residents paid taxes to, and were educated by, the church. There was nothing in the law to prevent it.

But it is the inauguration itself which reveals that religious instincts cannot be extracted so easily from human affairs. For George Washington, the first President to be inaugurated back in New York City in 1779, the rather last-minute idea was that he should swear on a Bible. None being found to hand, they borrowed one - from a nearby Masonic Lodge. It was fitting. The Founding Fathers certainly tweaked and trimmed the traditional religions they were raised in - but they could not dispense with them. Even the word, ‘inaugurate’, is snagged on a religious root. ‘Augury’ was the practice of discerning the will of the Gods in Ancient Roman political cult.

Christian imagery and sentiment has, over time, returned to irrigate the dry, rationalistic plains of U.S. civic ceremonial. Certainly the likes of Washington and Jefferson saw their country under the auspices of a Supreme Being, just not necessarily aligned with one of the world’s faiths. But for the George Bush inauguration of 1989, the evangelical tone was explicit. Billy Graham began things with an invocation, and the new President ordered a national day of prayer to follow, in thanksgiving for a successful transfer of power. There will be quite an obvious development of this during Trump’s 2025 inauguration, when Franklin Graham, the son of the famed evangelist, will lead the invocation prayer alongside Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

There is, perhaps, no getting around the human need to call on something larger than ourselves in our most meaningful moments - when we pledge to love someone for the rest of our lives, or swear our commitment to rule justly. The inauguration has been a good indicator of this, in the way that it has increasingly reached for an older, outright Christian language in which to express the profoundest longings and ambitions of a nation. God, it turns out, never quite leaves the frame.