Robinho, despite his his £32million price tag, was not the most significant signing on the last day of the transfer window. The little-noticed (beyond the north-east of Scotland) arrival in Aberdeen of Birmingham’s Sone Aluko deserves that distinction.
Aluko cost about £50,000 – Robinho, to save you the calculation, was 640 times as much – but his departure is symptomatic of all that is wrong with English football. An under-19 England international who marauded past Bayern Munich’s defence while on loan to Aberdeen last season, he’s a wonderful talent that deserves the chance to test himself in the Premier League, but has been squeezed out of even the Championship by clubs that prefers to look for sure things from abroad than take a chance on homegrown raw talent.
The English national team is already suffering from a drying up of decent young players, and stars whose huge salaries mean they just don’t care that much about playing for their country. (Put the recent thumping of Croatia to one side – remember what happened after a foreign manager masterminded a 5-1 win in Germany seven years ago?) Its underachievement is a symptom of the disease: clubs which are willing to sell their soul to any dubious source of mind-boggling sums of cash.
The transfers of Robinho and Aluko on the same day were a symbolic moment for English football: feeding the egos of millionaire owners now trumps the development of indigenous talent.