Will Alexander Isak move to Liverpool and join the list of famous transfer deadline tales
David de Gea definitely had talent, but the faulty fax machine that derailed his mooted move to Real Madrid did not. That revolutionary 1980s piece of office technology was still used by the world’s biggest clubs to finalise transfers as recently as 2015, when the Manchester United goalkeeper was readying for his agreed swap with Real Madrid shot-stopper Keylor Navas.
Navas, waiting to board his flight to Manchester, burst into tears upon hearing his documentation had not been sent to Madrid in time because a fax machine had malfunctioned. At least the Costa Rican did not fall asleep at the airport like Benjani Mwaruwari – or so we thought.
In 2008, Benjani was the subject of one of Redknapp’s most famous 11th-hour deals while managing Portsmouth, to whom Manchester City made an offer “too good to turn down”. The Zimbabwe international was sent to Southampton airport on deadline day afternoon to fly to Manchester for his medical. But chaos ensued, and he missed two flights before a third was cancelled.
The fax machine: a revolution in the ’80s, an archaic foiler of transfer deals in the 21st century. Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
The story goes that Benjani was stalling because he did not really want to go, but he recently spoke for the first time about the bizarre mystery, revealing he neither fell asleep nor got cold feet. “Before this interview, I always have a lot of questions about that,” he told the BBC in January. “The flight? Delayed. And my phone, now, I didn’t bring the charger, my phone is dead.”
David de Gea’s 2015 move to Real Madrid was derailed.Credit: Getty Images
He made it to City’s training ground at 11.10pm for his medical. “It was five minutes to 12, everything was just a mess there,” he recalled. “The fax machine broke down, so only one or two papers, they went through, and the rest were [missing].”
The paperwork did go through, which is more to say than that of Adrien Silva, which arrived 14 seconds past the cut-off for his August 2017 transfer from Sporting Lisbon to Leicester City and resulted in four months of limbo. Leicester had haggled hard over its sale of Danny Drinkwater to Chelsea, finally agreeing on a price late on deadline day, and then pushing ahead to sign his replacement, in a strong example of the domino effect so often seen as the clock ticks down.
Because of the 14-second delay, FIFA blocked Leicester’s attempts to register the Portugal international and even refused to fast-track the club’s appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, meaning Silva was initially prohibited from training with his new teammates and unable to make his debut until January 2018.
Then there was Robinho, who thought he had signed for Chelsea when he’d actually signed for Manchester City. Real Madrid’s Brazilian forward had been closely linked with Luiz Scolari’s Chelsea during the 2008 season and was so set for Stamford Bridge that the Blues even released images of a Robinho shirt on the club website. Until, at the last minute, they were scooped by City, and a slightly confused Robinho had to say he was happy to join City even though he would have been happier to join Chelsea.
The stories of Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Not Yours) are many, spanning many years. A classic occurred in 1997, when Monaco captain Emmanuel Petit met Tottenham chairman Alan Sugar in North London about a prospective move to Spurs, before asking the club to call him a taxi. As the story goes, instead of heading for his hotel to think about the offer, the pony-tailed Frenchman nipped down the road to Highbury to meet with Arsenal chairman David Dein and manager Arsene Wenger. Wenger, who managed Petit at Monaco and just joined the Gunners, had caught wind of the Spurs meeting and wanted to make his own pitch.
“I met Tottenham in the morning, but when I came to England I didn’t know about the rivalry between the two clubs,” Petit has since said. “When I left the Spurs stadium, they booked me a cab and the cab driver asked me for directions, so I gave him the Arsenal address and I didn’t realise that the cab was pre-paid by Spurs, so they knew where I was going.”
It was a classic hijack reminiscent of Arsenal’s swoop for Eberechi Eze almost three decades later.
Off-field moments have gone viral, too, and none beat the SportItalia reporter who, while camped outside Stamford Bridge late in the January 2016 window, was accosted by a member of the public wielding a giant inflatable banana. Fed up with being poked in the face by the comical apparatus while live on air, the reporter seized the banana and used it to batter his perpetrator over the head (also while live on air).
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Of course, there are also the myriad successful, controversy-free transfers that proceed without a hitch. And then there is Ryan Babel, who travelled by helicopter from Liverpool to an unspecified London location on transfer deadline day in August 2010, amid interest from West Ham. Nobody ever saw the helicopter land, and the Dutchman later posted on Twitter that he was “going nowhere” and was “LFC all the way”.
He later revealed he pulled out after arriving in London, when Liverpool’s director of football broke the news his apparent loan was actually a permanent move. Nevertheless, the mythical tale spawned the term ‘Babelcopter’, which still makes the occasional online appearance to reference a player with destination unknown.
Moral of the story: never board the Babelcopter (and do not live like Odemwingie).
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