SEPT 2 ― As any fans of European football will already be fully aware, yesterday saw a frenzy of transfer activity as the continent’s top clubs scrambled to make their final purchases before the deadline slammed the window shut for another four months.

Deadline day is a strange affair, keeping supporters on tenterhooks for news of the latest developments from their clubs, however unlikely or lacking in credibility the latest slice of (mis)information may be.

At the end of it, a handful of clubs boldly pronounce themselves to be delighted with their last-minute purchases, a few more are devastated at the lack of activity and the vast majority reside in the ambivalence that lies between excited joy and frustrated despair.

I’ve always felt that clubs who leave their summer signings until the final few hours of deadline day are akin to students who don’t get around to writing their course essays until the night before they have to be handed in.

And just like those students, they often find themselves having to rush the project through to completion without spending enough time researching their subject, therefore ending up with wholly unsuitable answers.

For immature teenagers who are still finding their way in the world and are largely focussed on socialising with friends, that kind of approach is inevitable and pretty much acceptable.

But for experienced and well-paid professional executives who are responsible for the running of a high-profile business which generates millions of dollars’ worth of revenue every year, it’s a rather shoddy state of affairs.

Witness, for example, Manchester United, who have known all summer ― even longer than that, in fact ― that they are lacking a commanding central defender and a ball-winning defensive midfielder, but ended up signing another striker, Radamel Falcao.

Assuming he has fully recovered from the serious knee injury which forced him to miss the World Cup Finals, Falcao is a very good striker indeed. But he’s not at all what United needed, and it’s hard to see how he will significantly improve the team or contribute in a way that Robin van Persie and Wayne Rooney, for example, already couldn’t.

Manchester United’s new signing Angel Di Maria (left) poses for a photograph with his shirt and with manager Louis van Gaal at Old Trafford in Manchester, England August 28, 2014. — Reuters pic

Returning to the last-minute student analogy, the signing of Falcao can be compared to a desperately thrown together essay on a subject which the student already knows inside-out; it might be a well composed piece of work, but it doesn’t do a particularly good job in answering the question that had been set.

However, in the defence of clubs whose deadline day moves are seemingly constructed with haphazard abandon, the transfer market is a confused, confusing and treacherous place where life is nowhere near as simple as deciding which player you want to sign and then signing him.

Deals are dependent upon other deals; the terms of deals change; some long-planned deals collapse and others unexpectedly emerge, and, perhaps most importantly, deals are dependent upon agents, who have no real loyalty to anyone or anything other than making money and consequently “play” the market, using clubs and their “client” players as a vehicle to get what they want: more money.

None are better at manipulating the game than Jorge Mendes, the Portuguese super-agent who first rose to prominence as Jose Mourinho’s representative and his since shown his compatriot’s famous ruthlessness and win-at-all-costs approach to enriching himself.

This summer has been particularly fruitful for Mendes, with the pernicious uber-agent especially profiting at the expense of Manchester United, whose big-money new signings Angel Di Maria and Falcao are both under the Portuguese’s management (as well as James Rodriguez, Cristiano Ronaldo and so on).

Another often overlooked factor when deciding transfers is the family life of the player concerned. In any walk of life, it’s only natural that employees will consult with their families before committing to a career move, with factors such as children’s schooling and proximity to other members of the family coming into play.

It’s often no different for footballers, and it should be more widely appreciated that a transfer between two geographically remote clubs does not just involve the player concerned moving from one city to another, but also his family.

This was a factor, for example, in Alex Song’s move from Barcelona to West Ham United last weekend. Purely from a footballing perspective, Song will have received better offers than the Hammers, but he publicly acknowledged that his wife and children were keen to return to London so they became his favoured choice.

Many players, on the other hand, will be happy to take a short-term view and simply join whichever club is prepared to pay them the most money. This is where agents come into their own, playing clubs off against each other in the often successfully fulfilled hope of enticing them into entering into a bidding war in which the clear winners are the players…and their agents, of course.

This is how some transfers can be on, then off when a better deal comes to the table, then off again when that deal becomes overtaken by yet another…ad infinitum until everyone runs out of time and has to settle for whatever still happens to be available.

Perhaps it’s no wonder after all, then, that transfer deadline day is typically such bedlam.

Because one way in which the essay deadline analogy becomes redundant is that, unlike football clubs, students don’t typically find themselves besieged by hangers-on offering to change their questions and reward them with better grades ― for a small fee, naturally.

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.