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The curious case of Clive Allen’s mystifying transfer to Arsenal came to mind this week. Allen was a promising 19-year-old striker at Queens Park Rangers when Arsenal signed him for £1. 25million in the summer of 1980. To put that sum in perspective, Allen became English football’s first million-pound teenager, so it was a significant deal. Advertisement Then it became strangely conspicuous. Before the season began, before he had even played a minute of competitive football, he was ushered out in the direction of Crystal Palace as part of a swap deal for England left-back Kenny Sansom. He signed, he never played, he left. To this day, the Allen conundrum has never been explained.   Footballers as pawns to be moved around, sometimes without obvious rhyme or reason and occasionally without much say in where they end up or why, has gone on for aeons. All the same, it was hard not to wince at the recent experience of Ishe Samuels-Smith, the 19-year-old left-back. In July, Samuels-Smith (pictured above) was sold by Chelsea to Strasbourg for a €7. 5million ($8. 8m; £6. 5m) deal negotiated between two clubs under the same ownership umbrella. After a month in France, Chelsea suddenly bought him back for a fee listed on Transfermarkt as a question mark, and loaned him the same day to Swansea City. He duly plastered on a smile to pose in his new tracksuit, holding up his latest shirt, and we can only wonder what was going through his head.   Alexander Isak’s move from Newcastle United to Liverpool represents the apex of player power, but there are enough examples of players being treated as commodities to feel there is a worrying undercurrent of anti-player power.   Exhibit A: the dark side to the transfer window. For all the thrills of a signing, consider those at the other end of football’s insatiable food chain — the unwanted, the shunted, the wantaways who end up stuck, the lost in limbo.   Such is the pressure to compete, clubs take chances on players and when it doesn’t work out — inevitably, it happens — try to find new homes for those ungenerously known as the ‘bomb squad‘. Once a player’s value diminishes below the level of their salary and any attractive loan or transfer fee, clubs tend to put their own needs ahead of the player’s. Sometimes the hierarchy even gets angry with a player for not accepting a move to a club or country they don’t wish to go to, even though they have a contract that was signed in good faith for an agreed-upon amount of time. Sometimes clubs isolate them at training or make it clear they won’t be selected to pressurise them into taking their boots elsewhere.   Advertisement Imagine waking up on deadline day and being told a bid has been accepted from a far-flung bidder; being pushed to decide in an instant without necessarily having talked to a manager, knowing their ideas for you, or having much of a clue about the state of play on and off the pitch at your new destination. How much choice in your next step do you really have? It feels like the line between real football and fantasy football is more blurry than it should be. Can we offload Fabio Vieira? What’s the exit route for Axel Disasi? Ahh, let’s keep Kobbie Mainoo. Bang, in comes Harvey Elliott. Damn, can’t get Marc Guehi this week. Behind all these executive decisions are players who care about their professional lives. There is also more than that at stake: where they live, their family circumstances, the needs of children and parents. It is all part of the picture, and a good salary is not a justification for bad treatment.   Exhibit B: Mathys Tel, whose loan was made permanent at Tottenham Hotspur over the summer for a not-inconsiderable fee, is one of a group of players to be left out of their 22-man Champions League squad. Federico Chiesa is similarly sidelined at Liverpool. Omari Hutchinson, despite being Nottingham Forest’s record £37. 5million signing, was omitted from the club’s Europa League squad, as was Oleksandr Zinchenko, who joined on loan from Arsenal with European experience, which might have been useful at a club integrating multiple arrivals. What a feeling, to be welcomed to a new club and immediately made to feel like a second-class team-mate.   UEFA’s club competition rules, which restrict squad sizes if clubs do not register ‘locally trained’ players, are outdated in football’s current climate. They were ostensibly introduced as a measure against stockpiling players and to try to protect a semblance of a homegrown ethic within each country’s domestic league. These are both sensible ideas. But it’s difficult to sustain convoluted limitations on squad sizes when teams are increasingly stretched because top players are pushing their bodies (and minds) to meet an increasingly bloated fixture schedule.   Exhibit C: Last summer’s weird transfer merry-go-round, prompted by profit and sustainability rules (PSR), saw multiple young footballers shunted around between clubs so that the balance sheets could be redrawn to avoid fines for breaking the Premier League’s financial rules. Oh, the Corinthian spirit! What joy. It created a parody of ‘deadline day’ based on the end of the accounting period: Aston Villa and Everton sold players to each other, Villa also did similar in exchanging players for fees with Chelsea and Juventus, Newcastle sold Yankuba Minteh to Brighton & Hove Albion and Elliot Anderson to Nottingham Forest in a hurry to rake in some profit.   Advertisement It had the feeling of a monstrously warped ‘professional’ version of school kids trading football cards in the playground. Exhibit D: Across the Premier League, physio rooms are already busy, top players have already been under the surgeon’s knife, and the conversation about overplaying requires stronger attention at the start of a season that culminates with the World Cup.   In this billionaire’s sporting casino, player welfare — both physical and psychological — needs pushing, perhaps more than the players themselves.   (Top photo: Harriet Lander – Chelsea FC/Chelsea FC via Getty Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Since football fandom kicked in in the 1970s, the path to football writing started as a teenager scribbling for a fanzine. After many years with the Guardian and the Observer, covering the game from grassroots to World Cup finals, Amy Lawrence joined The Athletic in 2019. Follow Amy on Twitter @amylawrence71