According to one study, 23% of people give up their New Year’s resolution by the first week, while 80% have quit by the time the calendar flips to February.

Resolutions are silly, but we all have flaws and vices, so one of my goals in 2025 is to be more sympathetic towards people with idiotic proclivities that annoy me.

Which brings us to those infatuated with football transfers and rumours. It’s mostly a male cohort of bores with an Andrew Tate incel energy, pre-occupied with bitching in a defeatist manic fit about their football club not signing players or spending enough money. This garbage dominates the trending section on Twitter – despite the kleptocratic and fascist desires of Elon Musk being algorithmically promoted.

This is partly a me problem. I browse Twitter to catch up with the news, suitably this most often occurs when I’m having a shite. It’s tempting to offer the most obvious solution: no browsing that miserable website.

But ignoring those obsessed with their club’s transfer activity won’t help them. They’re addicts of a new opiate epidemic – the disease of me masquerading as the disease of more. Social media offers a continuous fix of instant gratification straight into the main line. Be it dating, porn, fetishes, information, shopping, gambling, likes, the success of others and football transfers and rumours, basically anything that can be commodified and coveted, amplifies an urgency that we’re perpetually falling behind the curve. Patience, resolve, contentment, well that’s for sanctimonious cucks. Better to demand everything, right now. And because everyone else is doing it, it’s sans shame.

At the extreme, these folks achieve a bigger dopamine high at their club being linked to expensive players, and goading the fans of a rival club who aren’t, than seeing their team win a game.

Yes, peculiar. But why? No matter how preposterous or fanciful a transfer rumour may be, the hypothetical is the ultimate safe space for a football supporter. Only in this pitiful realm can progress be linear and constant and the team immune from failure, injury and misfortune. In said context, particularly if your team is performing well and succeeds, we can consider complaints about a lack of money spent on new players, or not enough players acquired, to be a form of cowardice, even betrayal.

Perversely the whiners don’t even truly gain pleasure from their clubs buying players. Signings offer relief, temporarily expunging a perpetual fear that transfer inertia will prove ruinous to their club’s chances. Then the next negative result occurs, a precipitous comedown demolishes the transfer euphoria, doubts and discontent immediately resurface and the “we need more/better players” cycle repeats. Think of this process as a simpleton’s version of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

As an intervention, I suggest abolishing the January transfer window. It’s a draconian measure, I’ll concede, but let me make the case.

Removing the January transfer window diminishes the utility of persistent complaints at the failure to spend enough for months after the summer transfer window closes. It’s easier to maintain indignation if the promise of relief may be three months away instead of nine.

But I’m making the mistake of applying logic to this bullshit. Only 15% of transfers occur during January and this transfer window isn’t much liked within the game. Enzo Maresca isn’t a fan. He may have described it as a “disaster” in jest, but something has adversely affected Chelsea’s form in January. Chelsea, it should be noted, have been rightly criticized for buying too many players, so no January transfer window would help them from themselves.

The obsession with transfers is widespread, but the biggest crybabies appear to be Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United fans. The biggest and most successful clubs in the country, historically. Silverware has merely bred their entitlement for transfer largesse.

When not indulging in refereeing conspiracy theories, they openly despise Manchester City and Chelsea for lavishly spending and buying lots of players with ill-gotten gains, but snipe at their own club’s comparative frugality or inability to buy well. Their public wallowing at their club’s financial limitations betrays denials that they’re privately envious and crave their club be taken over by some grim autocratic petrostate.

This is the biggest success the nation states have achieved owning football clubs. Social media’s amplification of greed and jealously is fast turning supporting a football club into a zero-sum shell game. One that mandates a degrading obsequiousness on a par with bending the knee for royalty, billionaires and oligarchs to keep up with the Joneses.

But there’s something worse than the transfer obsessed complacently assisting this process – those who take advantage of their misplaced desperation with dismal clickbait content, which is rewarded by Twitter’s per interaction monetization model. Closing the January transfer window would give those awful transfer aggregator accounts a kick in the bollocks. Sadly, I’m not sure there’s anything that can neuter cunty banter watch-along content, with their Stake sponsorships, who exist to make bullish tweets about their team’s chances of succeeding on the pitch, but while simultaneously pillaring the way their club operates in the transfer market and trashing the club’s players whenever they lose. There are far worse people out there, but fewer groups are responsible for more wasted skin than this lot.

Despite it being bad for people’s sanity, there’s little doubt that the January transfer window is here to stay. It’s an opportunity for clubs, agents and players to extract more money from fans. This demented shit-for-brains variety of virtual supporting drives traffic on the club socials and it allows the worst forms of engagement farming imaginable to take advantage of people searching for contentment in the wrong way. You could say misery invariably loves the company of transfer rumours on Twitter.

I wanted my patience to endure as the January transfer window has. January has been a long, cruel month. Thankfully the January transfer window will soon close and February’s failure is almost here to rescue me.