Reijnders off to Saudi after a year

There is a sensible football argument here in that if a player does not look nailed on for the long term and someone offers that sort of money, you at least listen, especially at a club like City where they can replace quality more easily than most. But the wider point is that this sort of move makes the whole transfer window feel like a puppet show, one Saudi bid and suddenly everyone is rearranging their plans, fans are left trying to make sense of it and the only real winner is the bloke signing the cheque and maybe that is the bit that annoys me most because it takes the romance out of all of it
 
Al Qadsiah out here playing football manager with unlimited money and City are just letting them have the save file, absolute scenes mate
 
Tactically it is a bit funny because you spend all that time building a squad around profiles and then a Saudi bid just rips one out and you have to reshuffle everything like some dodgy jigsaw, football is becoming less about planning and more about who can survive the weird market the longest
 
I think City will be fine from a squad-building point of view because they operate at a level where one sale does not derail the whole machine, and if the fee is genuinely above £50m then it is hard to argue with the economics. But as soon as you step back from that and look at what it means for the sport, it feels grim, because a player can arrive with all the usual hype and then be gone before anyone has even decided what his actual role is, and that is before you even get into the Saudi effect on every other club trying to plan sensibly, I just hate how normal this all feels now and it is getting harder and harder not to sound like a miserable old man about it
 
This is exactly why people keep saying football is cooked because a player can join a huge club and then a year later he is off to Al Qadsiah for more than £50m and everyone is acting like that is just a normal Tuesday and not some mad symptom of the game losing its soul and its shape and its sanity all at once because the money just distorts everything and if you are a fan you are supposed to just smile and call it smart business while the whole thing gets more ridiculous by the week and honestly I am fed up of pretending this is healthy
 
From City’s perspective, this is excellent business if the fee is accurate. From a football perspective, though, it underlines how quickly Saudi money can reshape a squad and a player’s career path. It is hard to argue that the market is behaving normally when a one-year stay can end like this.
 
City probably see it as a clean win on the balance sheet, and maybe they are right from their own point of view. But it still feels like another example of the sport bending to whatever the biggest chequebook wants, imo
 
If the reported fee is right, City have turned a quick turnaround into serious value. The awkward part is that it makes squad stability look almost irrelevant, which is not great for the sport.
 
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