<b>Aabhas Sharma:</b> Transfer travails

Soon after the 2013-14 European football season ended, French club Paris Saint-Germain reportedly shelled out about $80 million to secure the services of Brazilian defender David Luiz from Chelsea. Luiz, whose hair looks like Sideshow Bob from
The Simpsons, has always been suspect when it comes to defending. But in a business - and football is a business - where values of players make little sense, the deal was termed silly but acceptable. Ever since clubs have started spending silly money on transfer fees, such deals are slowly but worryingly being accepted as "routine".

And why not, when year after year clubs shatter records when it comes to buying players. Last year Real Madrid paid $130 million to buy Welsh winger Gareth Bale from Tottenham Hotspur. FC Barcelona paid $120 million to get Brazilian wunderkind Neymar Jr from Santos. English clubs spent £630 million (over $1 billion) in 2013 buying players.
 

Bizarrely, English players are the most overpriced even when they've never achieved anything on the global stage. Liverpool spent £35 million ($60 million) on Andy Carroll in 2010; Manchester United recently paid £30 million ($51 million) to sign the 18-year-old left-back Luke Shaw from Southampton.

The rich football clubs - Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Manchester United - do at least, in their defence, make enough revenue to buy players at improbable prices. But for the fan, the transfer market is slowly losing its sheen. You can't help but scratch your head seeing some of the money clubs spend on players who are barely above average. When you see Liverpool spending $25 million on Adam Lallana - who had one good season with Southampton - you know that there is very little value in the market.

Barcelona, as a club, have an annoyingly holier-than-thou attitude. Yet they just spent $128 million on Luis Suarez. Suarez is an immensely talented footballer - but he is also a serial biter, has racially abused another player and has a well-deserved reputation as a diver. Barcelona's former coach Gerardo Martino described Real Madrid's Bale deal as "a lack of respect for the world we live in". Yet Barcelona see enough value in Suarez - a man who has bitten an opponent not once, not twice, but thrice - to make him the fourth-most expensive player in football history. Go figure out where the "respect" is that Barcelona keeps talking about!

The transfer window is perhaps slowly turning into an arms race. With billionaires from Russia, the United States and central Asia owning clubs, they are more than willing to spend crazy sums of money. If Barcelona spent $128 million on Suarez, Real Madrid countered it with $108 million on the prodigious but relatively inexperienced Colombian, James Rodriguez.

European football's governing body, the Union of European Football Associations, or UEFA, introduced rules on financial fair play, or FFP, to bring some sanity in football transfers. Those clubs who flout the FFP rules could be banned from UEFA competitions. But there are so many loopholes in the rules, it's pretty easy for clubs to get around them. The basic principle of the FFP is that clubs can't spend more than they earn or else they will be penalised. But the UEFA is living under a rock if it thinks the FFP will succeed in deterring clubs from spending huge amounts of money on players.

The transfer window used to be a whole lot of fun, but seeing the behemoths of football spend insane amounts of money is slowly taking away the fun from it. The rumours around players being linked to one's club used to be exciting - will he join or won't he? But Twitter has taken away that fun as well. Almost every other hour you have an update from the so-called ITKs (those "in the know") at clubs. "Deal agreed. Player will join soon." The next minute it is "another club comes in", and then "deal scuppered" and so on. The big clubs will not perhaps suffer because of this kind of spending, but the smaller clubs will certainly suffer. English club Portsmouth spent outside its limits, and went into administration. Leeds United is still suffering from the hangover of the money it spent between 2000 and 2003 to get into the Champions League - they were relegated from the Premier League in 2005 and haven't made it back.

Fans share a peculiar relationship with the football clubs and at times fill in a huge emotional void. For some, a club is more than just a club, and I don't mean FC Barcelona alone (although their motto is "mes que un club", or more than a club). Simplistically, as long as revenue keeps coming in, the transfer fees will keep on increasing. But the influx of such huge sums of money might just alienate fans. Football might be a business - but it exists to serve the fans. Clubs shouldn't forget that basic fact in the race to outlast their competitors in terms of spending money.