Coronation Street has no drama like the transfer window

Football is a soap opera but Albert Square doesn't go around buying up the best characters from other shows
Franck Ribery
Soap operas are exciting but are not a patch on the transfer speculation on players such Franck Ribéry. Photograph: Francisco Leong/AFP/Getty Images

Football is a soap opera. I don't mean that as an insult, by the way, I'm talking film theory. Football as a narrative, as any of those A-level students with an A grade in Media Studies and no college to go to will tell you, has the exact same structure as soap opera. There are returning characters and they live within a story that had a beginning once, and now just has an ever-expanding middle.

It never comes to an end, so the characters don't ever get to finish their "journey", nobody really learns anything and none of the major questions are answered. This is why football, while compelling, will never be as complete a work of art as Great Expectations, say, or Spider-Man 3.

Football is a soap opera. The one difference between football and EastEnders though, and it is one hell of a difference, is that Albert Square doesn't take a couple of months off every summer and go round buying up the best characters from other shows.

This whole Manchester City business, for example, would be like tuning in to Coronation Street and suddenly finding out that one of the houses had been bought by the Saudi royal family and instead of Ken and Deirdre Barlow, it now contained an exciting replacement family of Jack Bauer, Iggle Piggle, that new Doctor Who and whatever the name of that lady from Desperate Housewives is, played by Eva Longoria.

Obviously, you'd still have the Barlows mooching around but they'd only really get a run-out during the Carling Cup. In this metaphor Richard Dunne is Ken Barlow. Or Blanche. Obviously, critics will be quick to point out this new family will need time to "gel".

In early episodes, there will be much confusion due to Iggle Piggle's inability to talk; so that when Jack Bauer reveals that he's actually Rita Fairclough's long lost son, Iggle Piggle spends the entire episode waving a red blanket around unhelpfully and dancing. Meanwhile, Sol Campbell is wandering around the set of Emmerdale wondering if he's made a terrible mistake.

Of course, the real purpose behind the transfer window, and in particular, Tuesday's closure of the transfer window, is to give some purpose to Sky Sports News. Sky Sports will go bananas on Tuesday. All day long they'll be reporting sightings and medicals and sightings of medicals, their pitch rising to feverish levels as it goes on, as we all cluster around screens hoping that our club has been playing poker all summer and is now ready to slam those four aces down on the final hand.

This is what Sky Sports News lives for. This biannual broadcasting transfergasm reached its ludicrous zenith in February when Rupert Murdoch went as far as to arrange a blanket of snow across the country so that a nation of housebound men could watch Andrey Arshavin make phone calls from the lobby area of a Hertfordshire hotel. Unfortunately, we may not scale those heights again. The words on the street this year are "debt repayment", meaning that not only might your club not be holding any great cards when the betting stops, they might not even be at the table.

There is every chance that no business at all is going to be done at the 11th hour (which confusingly starts at 4) and that Sky will have no "Ferguson steals Berbatov from the airport" scoops to trumpet. We should come to the rescue. After all, you're probably as exhausted of the phrase "has been linked with" as I am. It's time for revenge.

As Sky seems duty bound to report any fragment of information, no matter how far-fetched, we should keep them busy. From Monday morning, let's keep Sky pumped with sightings. And the more banal the better. Let's text in if we see Ronaldinho mooching round Eastlands. In fact, let's even text it in if we don't. Was that Wayne Rooney picking up a Spanish phrase book in Manchester Airport? Later I heard him repeating the phrase "donde esta la Bernabéu?" over and over again in the urinals. Is that significant?

Terry from work, right, his wife just saw Rafael van Der Vaart looking in the windows of a Foxton's in Hull. Interestingly, just the rental section. Marouane Chamakh was in the queue ahead of me in B&Q at Brent Cross buying plug adapters.

My auntie Mary was just at Mass in Liverpool cathedral and she swears she saw Franck Ribéry there. He didn't know the words to anything. She thinks he was just trying to get his kids into the local catholic primary school. Franck doesn't trust the state system. I want to see Sky Sports News investigating all of these and more. The airwaves are yours.