It's April, a key month on the field for most football clubs but also off it as they finalise their next transfer targets. Agents are busy lining up as much interest in their clients as possible. For them, a dream scenario is rival clubs bidding for one of their players. Some are lucky enough to be in that position.
I spoke to one agent on Wednesday who looks after several top players, including a couple of A-listers. One has attracted four offers to move in the close season. He is not getting any younger but is undoubtedly a world-class player still performing at the top level for one of the best teams in the world. One offer is in England, another in Spain, while there's also interest from the United States.
I'd always held the view that the U.S. was a lifestyle choice for a certain type of footballer who wanted to enjoy living in the country. Many a player in England loves the idea of life in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. They are probably inspired by David Beckham, who headed for Los Angeles, or Thierry Henry, who lives in a cool Soho apartment in Manhattan.
What the agent said surprised me.
"The U.S. is our bottom choice," he explained. "The travel is horrific over there, and teams like their players in a hotel the night before matches. [The player] likes the idea of living in the country, but he'd spend a lot of time travelling on commercial rather than chartered airlines and not enjoying the country. The hotels used by the teams are fine but not to the standard he'll be used to in Europe. There are issues with money too. If he goes, he'll be earning up to 20 times what some of his teammates will be on, and that can cause problems. There are lads who he'll be playing with earning less than $40,000 a year."
The travel aspect is intriguing. In the past two months, I've interviewed footballers in Brazil, Iran and India, among other places. Travel was an issue that kept coming up.
When I spoke recently to Diego Forlan in Brazil, he said: "[The country] is huge, and when we travel away, we fly. We don’t charter planes but travel on normal scheduled services and often change planes in Sao Paulo. Our team don't all sit together, so I can be in 25C next to a businessman and a teammate can be in 6A next to an electrician. A couple of people have told me that I look just like Diego Forlan. At airports, we queue up like everyone else. There are no privileges for a football team like in Europe. I've taken flights for five hours within Brazil.
"You spend so much time away from home," Forlan continued. "I calculated that I’d been away for 200 days in 2013. That can be tough on family life, especially for players with kids. Sometimes it is as if players are expected to be machines, machines who live to play football.
"We're away so much because Brazilian teams stay in a hotel the night before every game, home and away. For away matches, we stay another night in a hotel. Two away games and you can be away for a week. Then throw in my international travel with Uruguay and you can see why I'm continually on the road."
His situation was made even worse because his club, Internacional, had to play every home game away as its stadium was being remodelled for the World Cup. He paid rent to live in a city that he was rarely in.
Forlan has since moved to Japan, where he is enjoying life in Osaka and seeing a lot more of his new wife than he would have had he stayed in Brazil. The travel should be reduced, not that he expects to be taking any holidays just yet.
In Iran, one of the biggest problems coach Carlos Queiroz faced when he took charge of the national team in 2011 was a logistical one.
"We could play in Beirut on a Saturday, Tuesday night in Seoul and then Tehran five days after," he told me. "How can a team perform, especially when they are waiting five hours for connections in airports?"
The federation decided to support him with charter flights, which led to Iran reaching the World Cup finals.
"We would not have been able to perform taking commercial flights," said Queiroz. "Logistics ruin many campaigns, especially as some wealthy countries, like Qatar, can use the best airlines in the world."
One of those airlines, Etihad, was announced as the official airline partner of Major League Soccer last month, but given that the Abu Dhabi-based airline doesn't fly internally in the United States, it will make almost no difference to MLS players, who will still have to take commercial flights.
In India, which is not an obvious football destination, some of the away trips necessitate 20 hours of travelling via bus and plane. One starts with a four-hour bus trip through a Himalayan mountain pass. The home team has a considerable advantage against visitors who have just spent a day of their life on the move.
The wife of a coach I spoke to said that she had become accustomed to a life of waiting for days on end for her husband to come home. She wasn't complaining and there are many pluses to their lifestyle, but that's how it was.
Faced with that or a choice of playing in England, where the longest Premier League journey away doesn't go beyond two hours -- teams fly longer distances or use fast intercity trains to do the bulk of their travel -- this is another powerful, but relatively little understood, reason why football on the small island is so attractive to the modern, itinerant professional.
English players take the short distances for granted because many of them have known no different. The English players in the World Cup will have to take three-hour flights during the tournament. It's hardly a trans-Amazon trek, but not something they're used to every week.
At Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson used to make a point if his team had to travel four hours by plane to Greece or Turkey in European competition. He thought the long flight affected his players and hoped he wouldn't draw sides from those countries, even if they did that only once every two years or so. For many footballers around the world, four hours would be considered routine, if not a short trip.