Movers and shakers

Footballers change clubs. It’s a simple fact of life.

One day they are expressing their undying devotion to one team and basking in the worship of the fans, the next they are playing for a bitter rival and kissing a badge they previously wouldn’t have wasted spit on.

Most players (minus a few notable exceptions, of course) are loyal only to their bank accounts and ambitions. Sometimes not even the latter, if the financial rewards on offer are big enough.

For fans, this is obviously a very bitter pill to swallow. They don’t pick and choose the team they support on the basis of where it is in the league or the price of match tickets. The overwhelming majority support one club for life, through thick and thin, till death do them part.

However, part of me understands this club-hopping. After all, footballers are just doing a job, and it is rare to find an employee who wouldn’t leave one job for another if the rewards were better. I’ve done it myself.

But then again, being a footballer is no ordinary job. It’s not like being an accountant, for example. You don’t get tens of thousands of people paying money every week to watch someone draw up a balance sheet before rushing down to the shops to buy a replica calculator.

Football is, by its very nature, an emotional beast, and that is why I found Fernando Torres’ actions over the past 10 days disrespectful in the extreme.

I’m not saying he shouldn’t have left Liverpool for Chelsea. His life, his career, his decision. But there are ethical ways and means of swapping clubs, and he didn’t follow one of them.

Handing in a transfer request was in itself a kick in the teeth to the club and fans who adored him. Doing it just a few days before the end of the transfer window meant he was effectively leaving Liverpool in the lurch, with little time to find a proper replacement.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, he then stuck the boot in by saying in his first interview as a Chelsea player that he had moved to a ‘bigger’ club to further his ambitions.

Admittedly, there isn’t much he could have said to appease the fury of Liverpool fans who spent the week burning replica Torres number 9 shirts in the street. No amount of platitudes would have calmed them down.

But at least he could have made the effort not to kick them while they were down. A bigger club? Erm, not if you check the history books. A richer club, undoubtedly, but not bigger.

I’ve always liked Torres as a player and I believe he will be a fantastic signing for Chelsea over the coming years. But he handled his move in just about the worst possible way.

One of the consequences of the way Torres allowed things to pan out was that Liverpool were left with just hours to find a replacement. Luis Suarez was already on his way to the club, true, but they didn’t want to find themselves back in the position of only having one serious striker on their books.

And panic, in my opinion, led Liverpool to take what must be the biggest transfer gamble in Premier League history – spending an absolutely staggering £35 million on Andy Carroll.

If you had told me prior to last week that he had been bought by a club for half that, I would have said that club had been well and truly ripped off.

The young lad has only played 41 Premier League games in his entire career and, while his return of 11 goals in 19 games this season is very good, that doesn’t put him up there in the top echelons of English football.

Added to that is the fact that Carroll comes with plenty of personal baggage – a bad boy image that Kenny Dalglish will need to work on from the word go.

I’m not suggesting he isn’t a good signing. Far from it. Carroll has the potential to go on to be one of the great English centre forwards of his generation. But it is still only potential, and you don’t pay £35 million for potential. Carlos Tevez, to use an easy example, was rumoured to be considerably cheaper than that, and he is very much the finished article.

I’m sure if Liverpool’s board had to be totally truthful about the deal, they would admit to having paid well over the odds for the former Newcastle striker. And they would also admit they did so because of the timing of Torres’ departure.

Despite everything though, I think these comings and goings could turn out to be a good bit of business for the Anfield board. They may have lost a world-class player (although he hasn’t been that for a while now) but they gained a proven international star in the form of Suarez and a bucketful of ‘probably’ in Carroll. A smart, if severely over-inflated bit of rebuilding, I would say.

On a side note, those Liverpool deals helped push the total English spending in the transfer window to the £225 million mark, which is staggering, at a time when Uefa is preparing to clamp down on finances.

Ironically, it is those forthcoming spending restrictions which probably provoked this latest spree, being one of the last opportunities for clubs to splash silly money before the new regulations start coming into effect.

In fact, because of the new rules, which mean a club must break even in the three previous years in order to play in Europe, there is a genuine belief that the days of ridiculous transfer fees may now be over. Clubs will need to live within their means, and that should force prices down.

A consequence of that is that the Torres deal will probably remain the record transfer between English clubs for the rest of time. A move they would rather forget will now be thrust in the faces of angry Liverpool fans for decades to come.

And if you were in any doubt as to how angry those fans are, then you should get a reasonably clear indication this afternoon when, in one of those beautiful coincidences football tends to conjure up, Chelsea play host to Liverpool.

Normally you have to wait weeks if not months for a sold player to turn out against his old team. But in this case it will only have been six days since the deal was done. Passions will be running high at Stamford Bridge.

If Torres plays for his new club – and I can’t think of a decent reason why you wouldn’t want your new £50 million signing to play in a crucial match – it will turn an interesting encounter into a fascinating one.

According to the Spaniard himself he desperately wants to open his account with a goal for his new club against his old one today. (Torres, twist that knife in).

As a rule, you would expect a player not to celebrate if he scores under these circumstances. But considering the bad blood between Torres and the Liverpool fans, and the fact that he is going to be on the receiving end of plenty of abuse this afternoon, I honestly can’t say what I expect him to do.

His instinct may be to turn and walk away quietly if he does stick one in the back of the net.

But then he may conjure up images of people burning shirts with his name on them in the streets of Liverpool and think, why not punch the air, why not show who I belong to now?

It should be fascinating to watch, so please, Carlo Ancelotti, make Torres the first name down on your team sheet today…

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com