Man Utd transfer error revealed and Liverpool miss out on deadline-day signing

The transfer window is but a distant memory, the interlull yet to truly get properly going. We’re all stuck in limbo.

But the need for content is constant, and into that news vacuum some content must flow. Which leaves us with Rio Ferdinand pretending Manchester United’s big mistake came two years ago in not making two £100m signings they had little chance of actually making, and more headlines pretending that Liverpool have made some kind of damning decision on Hugo Ekitike’s role.

There’s just a load of absolute guff basically. And Mediawatch lives for guff.

The little things they make me so happy

The thing with elite, top-level sport is that tiny little things can make a huge difference. Marginal gains, and all that.

The whole caper is a series of tiny sliding-doors moments that could have changed everything.

Manchester United, for instance, are a clown-car basket case of a football club, whose penance for years and years of childhood-ruining dominance in the 90s and 00s now appears to be to spend the rest of their time existing merely as a punchline for everyone else’s jokes.

But it could have been so different. The Sun has more…

More than a decade has passed since Manchester United last won the Premier League, but one member of that squad things (sic) just two signings could have made things very different.

That’s all. Just two signings. Two titchy little signings. And which two signings are those, Rio? (Because of course this is Rio Ferdinand.)

Rio Ferdinand won his sixth and final league title in 2012-13, as part of a strong English core under Sir Alex Ferguson, and believes compatriots Declan Rice and Harry Kane could have set United right in the years since.

Yes, if United had simply signed the best English midfielder of this generation and the best English striker possibly ever, things could all have been so different. Fine margins.

Of course, you do have to ignore the fact that by the time either of those players represented any kind of solution to United’s problems the Red Devils had already been quite sh*t for quite a long time and those two elite players therefore had far better offers. Which is a big part of why they are not now Man Utd players.

‘I honestly think, I’ll say this and I’m convinced, if United had gone and got Declan Rice and Harry Kane in that [summer 2023] window, Man United are in a different place now.’

Well… yeah. Probably. If a conspicuously sh*t football team had simply bought what were at the time England’s two best players, they might now be less conspicuously sh*t. But you could say that about a lot of other mid-table clubs too, Rio.

Really is baffling where this idea of ludicrously entitled Manchester United arrogance comes from, isn’t it?

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Breaking news

A classic Modern Football Journalism wheeze is to ‘innocently’ publish a story of deeply questionable relevance and value talking about some bit of ancient history or other while by sheer serendipitous happenstance framing it in such a way that by total unplanned accident it alas tricks people into thinking it’s quite a significant story about current events.

And the Mirror have provided a textbook example with this piece published entirely coincidentally just after the transfer window closed now in September 2025 under this surely unintentionally potentially misleading headline

‘Liverpool wanted me on transfer deadline day – but I decided to turn them down’

Duje Caleta-Car, obviously. January 2021, because of course. Get out.

Les is more

Yesterday we had Alan Pardew guessing Hugo Ekitike’s thoughts on Alexander Isak being framed as ‘Isak concerns raised’ and today we have something perhaps even more shameless from the Mirror.

‘He can be on the bench’ – Hugo Ekitike decision made after Alexander Isak’s Liverpool arrival

Once again, just heartbreaking that there simply wasn’t enough space to squeeze the really quite significant words ‘by Joleon Lescott’ into that headline after the words ‘decision made’ and save everyone the bother of clicking on this sh*t in the mistaken belief it might contain some viable content of any kind. Rotten luck.

Missing words round

And in a similar, if more overtly silly, vein comes this from the Daily Express.

Alexander Isak ‘refuses to speak on international duty’ as statement made on Liverpool man

The absolutely vital missing words here being ‘to the media’. He’s not furiously shunning Anthony Elanga or Viktor Gyokeres or Lucas Bergvall.

And that’s before we even get to the ‘statement made’ by Sweden press officer Petra Thoren which says he might speak to the media at some point, just not before the first match against Slovenia.

Admittedly, in fairness, you’re not getting all that in a headline.

Making his Mark

The canonisation of Mark Guehi after he became the first player in history to have a transfer fall through on transfer deadline day continues in the Mirror.

Marc Guehi’s behaviour in England training says it all after Liverpool transfer collapse

We’ve long since lost count of how many times we’ve said it, but once more with feeling: the story here is if the exact opposite of what has happened happened.

‘England footballer trains with England’ is not a story. If he’d turned up and acted the prick, then by all means crack on. That’s a story.

We’re also troubled by that headline. It’s surely screaming out for a ‘speaks volumes’ or perhaps even constitutes a showing of true colours. Mediawatch simply doesn’t have the bandwidth at this time to be adding ‘says it all’ to the list of bullsh*t headline phrases to add unmerited depth of meaning and significance to wholly mundane and trivial events.

Like a room without a roof

Mediawatch is coming round to the idea that football journalism has simply lost the entire run of itself and may never be able to recover its senses.

What we’ve got here, for instance, is Emi Martinez posting some pictures on the socials while on Argentina duty, accompanied by the word ‘Feliz’ and the Argentina flag. He is happy to be on international duty is the only halfway sane reading of this.

But ‘Emiliano Martinez is happy to be on international duty with Argentina’ is no use to anyone.

So when that gets fed into the giant Daily Star content-o-matic, this pops out:

Emiliano Martinez breaks silence on Man Utd transfer snub with one-word update

Genuinely, is everyone okay?