Get your money on Gosling in 2014

Plymouth to Newcastle, via Liverpool. It’s a route that takes eight hours by road and is the best part of 470 miles, but one of the summer’s most-drawn out transfers sagas has taken this journey. Read more.

Maybe not all that familiar to many soccer fans, but two years is all it’s taken for new Newcastle signing Dan Gosling to move this far, although Gosling’s a player who has courted controversy not by the bucket load, by the shed load. If you think of an industrial skip, he could fill 10 of the things.

It’s hard to think of where to start with Gosling’s transfer to the North East as there are so many parts of it that are just, for want of a better phrase, a crock of shit.

The first place you’ve got to start is back in early May, not 2009, 2010. Gosling was quoted as saying, of Everton, ‘there’s no other club I’d rather be at.’ Now, it’s true that the club should have followed the legal procedure that is in place, but if you offer the player a contract that has doubled his £8,000 you don’t expect the Devonian mercenary to come back moaning ‘ooo, arrrrghhh, I want it in writing I do.’ And on Gosling’s part why bother with the former statement when you know you’re going to leave? Granted he’s only 20, but at that age I’d have enough intelligence to not listen to my agent and stay at the club who have much higher stature than the barcodes on Tyneside.

That brings us to the next part of this deal, Newcastle United FC and the merry couple, Chris Hughton and Meek Ashley. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the antics of this club. After converting Gosling to the Toon Army’s cause, Hughton commented that he was thrilled to recruit precisely the type of player Chairman Ashley craved – young – I’ll agree with, energetic – injured for much of the rest of 2010, real potential for future re-sale – with his agent I’d very much doubt you’ll get anything. But that last factor really is a damning indictment of the way soccer has gone, and will not be music to the ears of the St James’s Park following.

Newcastle’s fans are, in all probability, gearing up for a title charge this season, such is the warped optimism on Tyneside, so to hear this will no doubt cause a ruckus. They’re not known as fans who sit there and do nothing when this kind of thing happens, are they now?

Last of all there’s the club who nurtured him, gave him his first taste of league football, and secured him a move to a Premier League club, financially troubled Plymouth Argyle Football Club. How much they get from this deal…nothing. Not even a pasty. The reason? Everton didn’t receive any money from the sale, which means the sell-on clause is now null and void.

It’s a sorry state of affairs that agents are still having this type of influence on players, and it’s never really going to change, but after scoring one of the most memorable goals in Toffees recent history, an FA Cup replay extra-time winner against Liverpool, Gosling instead has Toffees’ fans with the pitchforks at the ready. I hope you’ll join me with getting your money on now for Gosling’s Tyneside exodus in the summer of 2014, when his four-year contract expires. There’s bound to be a loophole to exploit, Meek Ashley’s not a clever man!