10 Weirdest Football Transfers That Happened This Summer

9. Marko Arnautovic To Shangai SIPG (£22.4m)

This lads a right little minx, isn’t he? Arnautovic tried to do a runner in January when he expressed a desire to leave West Ham to make a Bonanza-money move to China. Now, don’t get us wrong, if someone offered us 600k a week to play in a crap league and eat kick ass Chinese food every day, we’d be pretty interested, too.

What makes this deal so WEIRD is that Marko changed his mind. He stayed. He told the West Ham fans ‘The fans give me the power, they gave me the energy’. Loyalty in football in the 21st Century is a rare and beautiful relic and finally, finally we had a shimmer of hope. The Hammers talisman had his head turned to the land of the Rising Sun and with the arrogance and defiance of a Beyonce backing dancer, shook his head.

Not quite. That ‘power’ and ‘energy’ must have had the plug pulled somewhere because as of the 7th of July Marko Arnautovic is a Shangai SIPG player. Things turned sour at an alarming rate and the player had decided that enough was enough once he learned of renewed interest from the Far East. West Ham, ever the vessels of some Amateur Dramatics on the media stage, described the deal as ‘terrible’ and the ‘manager, staff and players want him out’.

No coming back from that one. To accept such a small sum of money for such an important player shows just how much of a pain in the arse he must have been but even so, football has become a business and this deal has unfolded into a hell of a strange one.