Crysencio Summerville is on his own path
Football clubs can write whatever they want into players' contracts, but they still end up dealing with a big group of twenty-something manifest destinies with Instagram accounts.
Another summer brings another August and another wild swing through our moods thanks to Fabrizio Romano or whoever tweeted it first. He definitely posted the most unsettling Photoshop job so let's give him the credit he craves for this one.
Crysencio Summerville to West Ham United - this sort of thing felt inevitable as soon as the referee blew for full time in the play-off final in May, or even when Adam Armstrong gave Southampton the lead. The best player in the Championship would not be staying in it for another go, not when mid-tier Premier League clubs were bound to listen to his agent's patter about how he could help them, next season, finish 8th instead of 9th or whatever. Summerville might at a push have moved to a club playing in Europe; instead, by the looks of things, he's getting West Ham, who were beaten to that honour by the no-hopers from Old Trafford. They did finish 9th last season, just like we did a few years ago. I wonder why we didn't just keep doing that? Then we could have been the ones signing the Champo's best players. Anyway, the Hammers have just replaced David Moyes with Julen Lopetegui, so they are legitimately starting a 'project' that players can swear down they are 'interested in', whether or not the manager makes it to Christmas.
Knowing this was coming doesn't lessen the impact, and selling Archie Gray earlier in the window only makes it worse, when that raised a possibility that Leeds might keep Summerville after all. Some hope. Some dumb hope. Which is what keeps the whole transfer market reporting circus hollering around, incidentally, and I maintain that the world would be a better place if we weren't all following this all summer. My proposal: the window should close before the first weekend of the season, and no transfers should be announced until the morning of the first games (they should all be played on the same day and at the same time, too). That way all business will be kept out of our way and we can concentrate on the football, and there's none of this arguing about whether or not a transfer fee will be properly reinvested between receiving it and the end of the window; and fans of every club get lots of lovely surprises all at once. Oh, do they play for us now? Oh great! (Or, oh no.)
Instead of that we're stuck with the real world, which involves fans stubbornly refusing to adapt to the real world, in which players are always leaving when you don't want them to, or staying when you want them to go. Every summer in the Champo there's a high risk that the players who are good enough to take your team to the Premmo will bugger off there without you. You'd think we'd all be used to this by now, but no. Sometimes the reality check is necessary, and we can get it this season by looking across the Pennines, where Pep Guardiola is saying every nice thing he can about his goalie to prevent him moving to Saudi Arabia, while his wavering concern about Kevin De Bruyne's future can be tracked from interview to interview. If even Manchester City can't keep their best players, what hope do Leeds United have?
Manchester City have at least won six Premier Leagues with Ederson and De Bruyne, though, not to mention a Champions League. De Bruyne is 33 years old now and if he wants to go letting off his hamstring tension in MLS no City fan can really complain. In fact they're talking about putting up a statue of him. Must be nice.
That is different to our hope, and why it's so hard to watch players like Gray and Summerville leave. At this level - sorry for the reminder, but it's the Champo - when we get a really good player, like a really good one, we don't get to see them be really, really good. We can kid ourselves that it's 'fun' to watch a player develop, but what we really mean is that it's a good strategy when playing Football Manager. Because in real life it already sucks to be watching Archie Gray exploring uncharted regions at centre-back for Tottenham, being praised by people who aren't us that we don't like. Not even eighteen for most of it, playing at right-back for most of it, we did not see the best of Archie Gray at Leeds.