The Warm-Up: Arsenal cook the books* to sign a Chelsea fan

It looked briefly like someone incredibly dodgy had been doing the accounting at Arsenal this summer because the club started the transfer window with a budget of £55 million, spent £33 million on William Saliba and Gabriel Martinelli and then somehow stumped up £72 million large for Nicolas Pepe. Ponzi scheme alert.

Thus being a concerned citizen The Warm-Up got right on the blower to the Fraud Squad at the City of London Police, and somehow after four hours on hold, got a caution for wasting police time. Fuming. Turns out the Gunners have not been fleecing people of the hard-earned monies with the promises of astronomical returns but have been creative with their purchasing power. To cut a long and rather angry story short: Arsenal are only paying £20 million up front now and then a further £20 million next season and then another £20 million the season after that and you get the picture.

Fair play. A club-record signing on the cheery cheap – or as young people now say, you love to see it. However, someone check on the AFTV Media crew because it turns out that the boy Nicolas Pepe is a Chelsea fan. Yup and there is video evidence, dug up by the Daily Mail – and others – showing the 24-year-old saying that Chelsea made him dream, and they would be the only club he would sign for.

A touch awkward but there you go it was two years ago and a lot changes in two years.

There was a #hashtag doing the rounds on the socials yesterday and it was #ImOldEnoughToRememberWhen. Now, The Warm-Up can remember a time when transfer windows were not a thing: halcyon days people. Clubs could transfer players up until March 31st. The transfer window was brought in as a compromise with the EU to protect the integrity of the contracts within football - otherwise when, say Harry Maguire wanted to do one, he could just serve his notice period as is the case in pretty much any other industry in the world and hop off to Manchester United. Additionally it was an attempt to prevent wealthy clubs from buying their way out of trouble mid-season – it was sold as a mechanism that would encourage top quality coaching and also competitiveness.

Anyway, the transfer window, as many seismic changes do, had some unexpected results – first wealthy clubs stave off the chance of a mid-season lull/wobble by buying the living daylights out of everything that moves and stockpiling players before the window closes. Second, years later, it produced the horrible counterculture that has then become the perceived but wholly incorrect norm of every clown with a smartphone and Twitter handle tweeting that their club ‘announce [insert nobody cares]’ to every last damn tweet a club sends out.

Complete and utter tosh.

News broke early Thursday afternoon that Gareth Bale, a professional footballer, trained with the club he is contractually obliged to train with as a professional footballer. That, friends, is news during the transfer window. More as we get it. However, The Warm-Up is going to put its not too substantial reputation on the line by stating in the next 12 hours Bale will probably eat, shower and maybe do some other stuff – you know stuff people do.

Rafa Benitez eat your heart out, son.

That right there is some commitment to naked-ish-ness.

Now there is a way to do Twitter and there is a way not to do Twitter and this Tottenham Hotspur Indonesia is not:

The weekend.

In scheduling-based belter, The Warm-Up shall be brought to you on Monday by that clown that is Marcus Foley - #AnnounceFoley for Monday’s Warm-Up.