The race for Feyenoord's defender: Liverpool, Arsenal and Man City all look to a 20-year-old

Rotterdam, the night of December 17. The cold at De Kuip was dry and sharp, unlike the humidity of Penang where I live. I sat in the press area, two rows above the touchline, and looked down at the grass. On it, a twenty-year-old boy named Givairo Read was running down the right flank. He did not run like a full-back. He ran like someone trying to remember something he had forgotten ahead of him, and each time he accelerated, the man beside me — a Dutch journalist who had covered Feyenoord for more than twenty years — compressed a very soft "oh" in his throat. The match ended. On the scoreboard, the result no longer mattered for what I took home. What I took home was a sheet of notes with two lines: "Read — four assists in seven Eredivisie games" and "three English clubs monitoring." Those two lines, added together, were an entire winter transfer window opening up. And I knew, from eighteen years of sitting at the edge of the grass, that notes like these usually grow faster than the truth. The January transfer market does not begin with contracts. It begins with rumours, and rumours begin with a very simple sentence: "club X is monitoring player Y." The report I read that night, compiled from many sources, was a map of that language. At the centre of the map were Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester City — three clubs standing at three different peaks of a triangle of power, all looking at a twenty-year-old right-back from Feyenoord. That was the starting point. But reading only the surface of the report would miss the most important thing. Behind the name Givairo Read was a whole chain of other stories: a nineteen-year-old left-footed Brazilian centre-back just called up to the national team, a thirty-year-old Dortmund striker entering the final years of his contract, a fifteen-year-old Norwegian wanted by Manchester United, and a five-hundred-million-euro release clause belonging to a young Barcelona midfielder. Each story was a piece of the same picture: European football was restructuring the flow of talent, and small clubs were raising semi-finished products for the giants. That night's report had at least twenty items, spanning the Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, the Dutch league, Brazilian, Norwegian and Uruguayan football. Most of them used phrases like "monitoring," "considering," "reportedly," rather than "has bid." The distance between those two groups of words is the entire distance between a rumour and a contract. And in winter, that distance can stretch from days to months. The first thing I noticed was the recurring tactical pattern. Three leading English clubs were all looking at a right-back. Elsewhere in the report, Arsenal and Chelsea were said to be monitoring another right-back, Daniel Banjaqui, and another Feyenoord name, Zechiel. The overlap was not accidental. It reflected a change that had happened quietly over more than a decade. The role of the full-back has changed. Today a full-back does not only defend; he participates in build-up, and in many teams he is a second winger when the team has the ball. This explains why a twenty-year-old with four assists in seven games is in the sights of three top clubs. But there is a paradox in that story, and I want to address it at the end of this piece. The report was not only about England. It was about a larger flow. In Brazil, a nineteen-year-old left-footed centre-back named Arthur Dias was valued at around thirty million euros, after being called up to the national team under coach Carlo Ancelotti. Barcelona, Tottenham, Newcastle and Atlético Madrid were all mentioned. Tottenham had offered twenty-one million euros for eighty per cent of the player's economic rights, and the offer was rejected. In Germany, Dortmund were worried about the future of thirty-year-old striker Serhou Guirassy, who had less than two years left on his contract. Manchester United were monitoring him. In Italy, Roma were interested in Raphaël Guerreiro, a thirty-two-year-old left-footed left-back, currently a free agent. In Turkey, Galatasaray and Mauro Icardi's representatives were waiting. And in England, the stories of Viktor Gyokeres, Kevin Schade, Raphinha, Marc Bernal, David Alaba, Conrad Harder, Ronald Araujo and Mauro Coronel formed a tangled web. I once sat next to an old supporter for ninety minutes at a match in Bukit Jalil, an eighty-seven-thousand-seat stadium. He did not sing. He did not clap. He just sat still and read out the name of every player on the pitch, like a prayer. He knew every name, including substitutes who would never come on. That was how I learned that a match does not belong only to those who score. The grass keeper of the eighty-seven-thousand-seat stadium has never once watched a match from the VIP seats. In 2026, when the pandemic froze world football, I was assigned to write about Malaysia's first match without spectators. The capacity was eighty-seven thousand, but the actual attendance was zero. In that silence, I met a fifty-two-year-old groundsman, still trimming every centimetre of grass in the penalty area even though no one was watching. He told me: "The grass doesn't know whether anyone is watching. The grass only knows it must be green." That piece got barely more than two thousand reads, but it was the one I loved most that year. I tell that story because it relates to what I want to say today. When people read a transfer report, they usually look at the big names — Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City, Barcelona — and forget the grass keepers. But it is the grass keepers, the small clubs like Feyenoord, Athletico Paranaense, Vålerenga and Club Nacional, who make the market. They grow the grass. The giants only come to cut it. And this is what I want to say about Givairo Read. The boy did not become a focal point by accident. He was grown at Feyenoord, a famous Dutch academy that has produced some of Europe's most modern full-backs. Four assists in seven Eredivisie games by a twenty-year-old is a notable figure, but it says nothing about his ability to adapt to the Premier League. The difference between the Eredivisie and the Premier League is not technical; it is intensity, the number of duels per match, the speed of decision-making under pressure. I have seen too many young players come from the Dutch league to England and dissolve. Not because they lacked talent. Because their bodies were not yet forged for a league where every phase is a physical battle. Tactics are only a confession written afterwards. The body is the witness of truth. Feyenoord understand this. That is why they once rejected offers of around twenty million euros for Read, and also why they may have to accept losing him in a January auction. When three top clubs pursue one player, the player's value is no longer measured by form. It is measured by scarcity. In another corner of the market, a different group of players is waiting. The free agents. Mauro Icardi, thirty-three. Raphaël Guerreiro, thirty-two. David Alaba, thirty-four. They need no transfer fee, but they demand wages, signing bonuses and agent fees. In a market where clubs must comply with increasingly strict financial rules, a free agent can be a bargain or a time bomb. It all depends on the structure of the contract. Every contract is a promise, but football has never kept a promise. Icardi was once one of the most wanted strikers in Europe. Alaba was once one of the best multi-functional defenders in the world. Now both are on the far side of their careers, and the market for them is a different market — where wages replace transfer fees, and injury risk replaces developmental potential. I remember the night of June 17, 2026, when Germany lost 0-2 to South Korea at Kazan Arena and were eliminated from the group stage for the first time in eighty years. I stayed up all night in my Penang flat, watching German fans leave the celebration in tears on screen. At two in the morning in Moscow, I heard an entire football empire break into a sigh. My piece, published at four in the morning, was titled "The Misfiring Poem of Germany," comparing the collapse of a giant to a poem that had lost its rhythm, that had lost its breath. From that moment, I formed a writing style. When defeat is inevitable, I focus on the beauty of collapse rather than dissecting tactical errors. I stopped writing "the team played badly" and started writing about how a team dissolved. Readers do not need analysis; they need a safe space to cry together. But there is a limit to that style, and I have to remind myself of it every time I hold a pen. If I turn every defeat into a tragic masterpiece, I will lose my characters — people of flesh and blood, not symbols. I return to the transfer report. One item caught my attention more than any other, and it had nothing to do with Liverpool, Arsenal or Manchester City. It was the item about Arthur Dias, the nineteen-year-old left-footed Brazilian centre-back. The reason was the structure of the deal: Tottenham had offered twenty-one million euros for eighty per cent of the player's economic rights. The phrase "eighty per cent of economic rights" is a red flag in modern football. It evokes third-party ownership, banned by FIFA since 2026. But it also reveals another reality: in South America, the economic rights of a young player are often shared between club, agent and investment funds. When a European club wants to buy, it must buy from several parties. This makes the Arthur Dias deal the most complex in the report. Not because the player is not good enough. Because his ownership structure is a legal problem. If I had to pick one sentence to summarise the whole report, it would be this: in modern football, a young player is not just a player; he is a financial structure. I have watched Arthur Dias in a few games in Brazil. He is a left-footed centre-back, the type modern coaches crave. A left-footed centre-back who can pass with his left foot opens passing angles that a right-footed centre-back cannot. In a back three, he can play on the left. In a back four, he is a natural option next to a right-sided centre-back. Barcelona and Tottenham, two clubs with a philosophy of building from the back, understand the value of this profile. But there is something the reports often overlook. A nineteen-year-old centre-back, however talented, needs time. In Brazil, he has space to make mistakes. In Europe, that space shrinks. One misplaced pass can lead to a goal, and a goal can lead to a week on the bench. That is why big clubs often sign young players and then loan them out. They do not buy to use now. They buy to own the future. And this is the blind spot of collective memory. When a big club signs a young player, fans usually think about what he will do for the team. But the club thinks about what he will become in three years, in five years. Between those two ways of thinking is a gap in time that the media never describes properly. In that gap, the young player is pushed back and forth between clubs, countries, tactical systems. He grows up in uncertainty. I think of the substitutes who never come on. I write about them more than about those who score. In a match, twenty-two players start, but hundreds of others are behind them: medics, tunnel staff, groundsmen, ticket sellers, and the young players sitting in the stands, waiting for a chance that never comes. Their football happens after the stadium lights go out. There is a kind of football that happens after the stadium lights go out. It is the football of deals that never happened, of three a.m. flights, of calls from agents, of meals eaten alone in hotels. It is football that no one broadcasts. But it is the largest part of football. In that day's report, one item made me pause longer than any other. Manchester United were monitoring a fifteen-year-old Norwegian named Gabriel Rajkovic. Fifteen. I read that number several times. At fifteen, a player can only sign an academy contract, and any international deal runs into FIFA Article 19 — the rule restricting international transfers of players under eighteen. There are only a few exceptions, and most involve family or non-football reasons. I do not like reports about fifteen-year-olds. I have seen too many boys put on the front pages before they were old enough to drive, then disappear before they were old enough to sign a professional contract. Football needs hero stories. But it also needs silence. Sometimes silence is the greatest gift the media can give a child. The report continued with stories of more complex structures. Chelsea were tracking Conrad Harder, a player at Strasbourg — a club within the same multi-club ownership system. Red Bull were interested in Vicente Vargas, and Getafe was a link in that network. This is the model reshaping European football: one group owning several clubs, with talent moving between those clubs at far lower cost than a normal transfer. The model has a good side and a bad side. The good side is that it allows clubs to develop young players in the right environment before promoting them to the first team. The bad side is that it raises questions about fair value and conflicts of interest. When two clubs under the same owner meet in a European competition, UEFA has the right to check. And when a player moves from one club to another within the same system, his value may not reflect true market value. I do not oppose the multi-club model. But I think it needs transparency. Football cannot keep operating as a market without a supervisor. In Vietnam, where I was born, small clubs routinely sell young players to survive. They become involuntary academies. They raise players for others. And when they sell, they never receive the player's true value. Loans with an obligation to buy are wrecking the financial plans of small clubs. A small club signs a loan with an obligation to buy, believing it will receive money in the future. But that money is locked to a specific date, and if the player is injured or loses form, the club must still pay. It is trapped between uncertain income and certain costs. Meanwhile, the big club keeps its flexibility. In that day's report, the item on Mauro Coronel was an example of that asymmetry. The player's contract expires in December, and Brighton and Aston Villa were monitoring. A player out of contract means the parent club receives nothing. They trained him, paid him, gave him chances. When he matures, he leaves for free. It is an unsustainable business model for small clubs. I once spoke to a young coach in Malaysia who spent his career training players for bigger leagues. He told me the hardest thing is not training players. It is keeping them long enough to bring back money. Football is a profession. But for those at the lower levels, it is often a profession that is not paid its worth. That is why I never use phrases like "goal machine" or "deal of the century." Such phrases hide the people behind them. A player is not a machine. He is a person with a family, with fears, with sleepless nights. When I write about a transfer, I try to write about the body first. A defender with shoulders slumped after a goal conceded. A midfielder breathing hard after ninety minutes. A coach with knees buckling on a Kuala Lumpur night. In that coach's eyes on that Kuala Lumpur night, I saw a final no one ever mentioned. It was the final of the losers. Football usually remembers only the winners. But it is the losers who carry the fullest story. They know the price of a mistake. They know what it is to wake up in the morning and realise everything has changed. I return to the specific items. In Turin, Juventus and Milan were monitoring Viktor Gyokeres. His parent club was described inconsistently, and that is a warning sign about source quality. When a report compiles many sources, it easily errs on basic details: which club is watching whom, where a player plays, how long his contract runs. Those errors may be small, but they reduce the credibility of the whole report. In London, Arsenal were said to be monitoring Kevin Schade and Viktor Gyokeres. The two have very different profiles. Schade is a young forward with a strong start. Gyokeres is an established forward with a slow start. A club monitoring both suggests it is looking for a contingency for the attack, not a direct replacement. In football, the difference between a contingency and a direct replacement is huge. A contingency can accept the bench. A direct replacement cannot. At Barcelona, the story is different. Raphinha is in the process of extending his contract to beyond June 2028, and Marc Bernal has a five-hundred-million-euro release clause. These are not transfers. They are asset-protection measures. Barcelona, with its financial difficulties in recent years, is trying to hold tightly to its most important assets. A five-hundred-million-euro release clause is not a realistic price; it is a road sign, reminding you that this road is not for pedestrians. I once lived in Madrid for a while, as a reporter for a sports newspaper. I learned that in Spain, a contract is not just a legal document; it is part of a culture. The release clause is a ritual. It says that a player belongs to a club, and to leave, one must pay a price commensurate with his importance. Sometimes that price is real. Sometimes it is just a number to stop others from calling. In that day's report, there was also an item on Aleksandar Stanković, a young Inter player with little playing time who could leave on loan in January. The item drew little attention, but it matters. It shows a reality: for a young player, playing time is the most valuable asset. A season on the bench can destroy the career of a twenty-year-old. A season of regular football at a smaller club can save it. Inter understand this. That is why they may choose a loan rather than a sale. A loan preserves the club's asset value. A sale does not. In a market where the value of young players is rising fast, keeping control of a young talent is a strategic decision. Even if he does not play for your first team, he remains an asset on the balance sheet. That is modern football. A player is not just a player. He is a line in a financial report. He is an investment that can appreciate or depreciate. He is part of a portfolio. In the world of esports, people win without needing to take off their shirts to celebrate. It is a world I follow alongside football, and I see unsettling parallels. The career of an esports player is shorter than that of a footballer. But their youth-development and post-retirement support systems are close to zero. A footballer can play until thirty-five, then move into coaching, commentary or a sporting director role. An esports player often ends his career at twenty-five, and then there is nothing. I think about this as I read transfer reports. The young players in the report — Read at twenty, Arthur Dias at nineteen, Rajkovic at fifteen — are at the peak of a profession whose peak is very short. They can earn a lot in a few years. But what then? Football does not prepare them for the answer. And the transfer market, with all its glamour, never asks the question. That is the biggest blind spot in football's collective memory. We remember goals, titles, moments. We do not remember the players who vanish at twenty-eight, who cannot find a new club, who must start over. Football is a harsh profession, and it is harshest for those in the middle. Not famous enough to be remembered. Not obscure enough to be pitied. Now I want to talk about what I consider the most important thing in the whole report. It is the quality of the sources. The report compiled more than twenty different sources: some are major newspapers, some are aggregator sites, some are individual journalists, and some are fan pages. The quality of these sources varies greatly. And in football, the quality of the source determines the quality of the story. I am not saying rumours are worthless. Rumours are part of the market. They show what clubs are thinking, what they are looking for, what they are willing to pay. But a rumour is not the truth. And readers need to know the difference. It took me many years to learn this. When I started, I was excited by every rumour. I thought that if a major newspaper reported it, it must be true. But then I realised that major newspapers can also err. They can be deceived by an agent. They can recycle old news. They can report an interest that was really just a phone call. That is why I always check information. Not because I trust no one. Because I believe truth matters more than speed. In an age when everyone can post, accuracy becomes a rare value. And for a writer like me, accuracy in language is the best weapon against prejudice. I remember a summer evening in 2026, when I was twenty-five, newly graduated with a master's in sociology and in my first job at an online sports newspaper in Penang. It was the Malaysia Cup semi-final between Kedah and Penang at Darul Aman. I was one of three women among forty-seven accredited reporters. An older male journalist beside me offered me coffee and joked that women do not understand tactics. The match ended 4-3 to Kedah. But my piece did not focus on the goals. It described the coach's grimacing face as the rain turned the pitch into a mud pit. I wrote about mud, about heavy running, about the breathing of exhausted players. I did not write about the winner. I wrote about the grass. From that night, I began collecting small details. A glance. A rainstorm. A sigh. Things that never appear in a statistics table but are tied to people. Every piece I wrote afterwards contained at least one detail unrelated to the score. That is how I take revenge through detail. Not to take revenge on anyone, but to take revenge for forgotten moments. I tell this story because it relates to how I read today's transfer report. When I read the names, I do not just see players. I see people. I think of the mother of a fifteen-year-old, trying to decide whether to let her son go to another country. I think of the wife of a thirty-four-year-old, preparing for life after football. I think of their children, who must change schools, homes, languages every time their father signs a new contract. That is the human part of a transfer. And it is the part transfer reports never tell. I return to the race for Givairo Read. Three clubs — Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City — all pursuing a twenty-year-old right-back. On the surface, this is a story about talent. At a deeper level, it is a story about fear. Liverpool fear losing their place at the top. Arsenal fear falling behind in the title race. Manchester City fear losing their dominance. And fear is a stronger driver than ambition. It makes people pay more for what they think they need. That is why a twenty-year-old with four assists in seven games can become the centre of an auction worth tens of millions. Not because he has proved something. Because he is a promise. And in football, promises are paid more than completed work. This is the counter-intuitive point I want to make. In the transfer market, the value of a young player is often higher than that of an established player of the same talent level. A twenty-year-old with potential can be valued at thirty million euros. A twenty-seven-year-old with a proven record might be valued at only twenty million. The difference is not quality. It is hope. The market does not buy what a player has done. It buys what a player might become. And hope is a commodity that can be sold. It never depreciates until it is replaced by disappointment. That is why big clubs keep signing young players at high prices even when they have enough players. They do not buy to use. They buy to own the right to hope. But hope has limits too. And the limit is the human body. A fifteen-year-old may become a star. But he may also be injured at seventeen and never play professionally. A twenty-year-old full-back may adapt to the Premier League. But he may also be crushed by the intensity of the league. Every contract is a bet. And most of those bets do not win. I have seen this too many times. A young player arrives to praise, plays a few games, then disappears. No headline announces his disappearance. He simply stops being mentioned. And the market moves on to another name. That is how football operates. It is not deliberately cruel. It simply does not stop. Now I want to talk about the second counter-intuitive point. Throughout the report, one word recurs: "monitoring." Liverpool monitoring. Arsenal monitoring. Manchester City monitoring. Manchester United monitoring. Monitoring is not bidding. Monitoring is not negotiating. Monitoring simply means someone has put a player's name on a list. And in football, every club has lists hundreds of names long. The difference between a list and a contract is enormous. But transfer reports often blur that difference. They turn monitoring into a race. A race into an auction. An auction into a deal about to be completed. Through layers of amplification, a phone call can become a headline. This does not mean rumours are false. It only means they must be read with sobriety. When I read a transfer report, I always ask three questions. Who is the source? What interest does the source have in reporting this? And can this information be independently verified? Those three questions usually help me tell a real story from a manufactured one. In the case of today's report, some items came from very credible sources. Some came from aggregators. Some came from individual journalists. And some contained clear factual errors — a club described as playing in a league it does not play in, a player described in a role he does not occupy, a loan described as a permanent deal. Those errors are not small details. They are signs that the information has not been fully checked. I think the modern football reader needs a new skill. Not the skill of reading statistics. The skill of reading sources. In a world where information moves faster than truth, the ability to tell real news from manufactured news is a survival skill. And that skill is not taught in schools. It is learned only through experience. I learned it from my mistakes. I once wrote about a player I believed would move to a specific club. He did not. I once wrote about a coach I believed would be sacked. He was not. Those mistakes taught me that humility is a virtue for a writer. We do not know everything. And what we know is often only part of the truth. That is why I always keep a distance from what I write. I do not write as someone who already knows the outcome. I write as someone observing, taking notes, trying to understand. My true position is at the edge of the grass, humble and close to the ground, where I record rather than judge. This year I am thirty-four. I have begun to believe that legends who leave at the right time are the happiest people. I think of players who finished their careers at their peak, who never had to endure the decay of age. I think of those who left before they were forced to leave. In football, timing is everything. And the right timing is a gift few receive. But most players do not get that gift. They play until no one wants to sign them. Then they leave, in silence, and the market moves on to new names. That is the fate of most of the people in today's report. Icardi, thirty-three, looking for a new club. Alaba, thirty-four, looking for a new club. They were once stars. Now they are names on a list. I do not write this to make the story sad. I write it to make the story true. Football is a wonderful profession, but it is also a brutal one. And those inside it deserve to be seen as people, not as assets. When I left De Kuip that night, I walked along the riverside road. It was cold. I thought about Givairo Read, the twenty-year-old caught in an auction he cannot control. I thought about the groundsman in Bukit Jalil, still cutting grass though no one watches. I thought about the fifteen-year-olds, who know nothing of the world they are stepping into. And I thought about what I always think when writing about football. That behind every contract, every rumour, every race, is a person. And that person, however he is valued, has only one life to live. A life that football can lift up or crush. That is what I want to remember. And that is what I want readers to remember. When you read a transfer report, remember that the numbers are not numbers. They are lives. Lives changing, fearing, hoping. And among them, many will not have a happy ending. I do not write to judge the transfer market. I write to record it. Because that market, with all its chaos and irrationality, is also part of football. It is how football reinvents itself each year. It is how small clubs become big clubs, and big clubs become legends. Or the reverse. The race for Givairo Read will end some day. He will sign a contract with one of the three clubs — or with another club no one predicted. Then a new name will appear in the papers. Another right-back, nineteen, from another league. And the story will begin again from the start. That is how football operates. It does not stop. It does not remember. It only continues. But we can remember. We can record the small details — a coach's glance, a player's sigh, the sound of a mower in an empty stadium. And we can retell them, so that those moments do not vanish entirely. That is my job. Not to predict the future. But to hold on to the past. So that the people in today's report, whether they succeed or fail, have someone who remembers them. I sat down at the table, opened my notebook, and wrote a few lines about the night at De Kuip. Four assists in seven games. Three English clubs monitoring. A sheet of notes. A twenty-year-old boy. And I thought: this is how a story begins. Not with a contract. With a moment when someone stops and looks. A moment that football, in all its rush, allows us to remember. Are we reading a transfer report, or a new chapter in the life of a person we will forget in a few weeks? And if we forget, are the grass keepers, the ones who read out every player's name for ninety minutes, the ones who still cut the grass though no one watches — are they the only remaining witnesses to a kind of football that is never broadcast?