The reality is that at the time the tapping-up story broke, on the back of newspaper stories about Van Dijk being won over by Liverpool’s manager Jürgen Klopp, the majority of people working in the game will have wondered what all the fuss was about. “So what?” pretty much summed up the football world’s response to reports that Liverpool had been sounding out Van Dijk without Southampton’s permission.
“I think that’s absolutely true – what’s new?” Peter Coates, the Stoke City chairman, says. “And I’m not against people trying to do something about it. I’m just very cynical about it changing. I just think that’s how it is. And when it happens against us at senior level, I never complain because we know ‘everyone’s at it’ type of thing. You could almost say it’s part of the fabric [of the game].”
Plenty of agents, managers, players and boardroom executives would be nodding in agreement at Coates’s comments. What happened with Van Dijk has gone on for decades in one way or another and to such an extent that senior figures who have worked on the other side of the fence, trying to enforce regulation and deal with disputes, say it would be a conservative estimate to predict that 90% of transfers involve an element of tapping up. The number of complaints, however, is minimal, which tells a story.
Spurs did a failed Leicester last season, next season I bet they back to 5/6th spot
