SPENT transfer deadline night huddled in a television studio. Well, at least until the security guard shooed me out, leavening the imperatives of harsh duty by handing me a pound coin for a cup tea.

I thus forgot to organise the candle-lit vigil at Celtic Park for Derk Boerrigter. This would have appealed to those who believe the Dutchman has endured more injury problems than the first wave of the charge of the Light Brigade and those who think his disappearance from the first team can be explained by his being abducted by aliens. This latter assertion has some credibility unless one believes the aliens were looking for a winger.

As I remarked to colleagues this week, Derk has a wonderful first touch. Unfortunately we have had to wait three years to see if he has a second. He signed for £3m from Ajax in 2013 and has played 16 times for the first team, the last being in August 2014. His propensity to be injury prone may be illustrated by the rumour that Ajax made six physios, two doctors, a chiropractor, a faith healer and a homeopathic chemist redundant when Derk made his farewell, inevitably spraining his wrist as he waved goodbye.

Celtic’s only chance of offloading the less than bold Bhoy in the transfer window was if the World College of Physiotherapists was in need of a research project. But I do not blame club, scout or player for Derk staying on in Glasgow on a weekly salary that may, just may be so north of 10 grand a week one has to hire a team of huskies to reach it.

Yes, the club could have looked more quizzically at Derk’s injury record, but it was hardly desperate. He played more than 40 matches in two years at Ajax. This does not qualify him for a Queen’s award for industry but it does not of itself hint at his woes in Glasgow.

Whatever, club and player are now locked in that traditional football embrace that is only loosened with the grease of dosh. They may be united until contract expiration doth them part. This, perhaps curiously, causes me little angst. There may be those who froth at the idea of a footballer earning big wages without being in the first team but I see it as the sport moving ever more closer to the real world. Every industry hires people with hope and expectation and then lives to regret the decision.

The problem for football is that it is perpetuating a system that is inherently absurd, desperately unfair to the individual and whiffs ever so slightly of a trafficking in bodies. There are many pertinent questions to be asked about the transfer window, but perhaps not to the volatile Colin Kasim-Richards.

But the essential ones are only whispered. Why is there a transfer system at all? Why can’t players simply sign contracts with clubs and then either renew them or leave at the end of them? Why do clubs trade billions in securing the services of the employees of others?

The answer to all of this, of course, is that there is not yet the will, or perhaps even the way, to dismantle a system that has endured for more than a century. The flaws in transfers – their capacity to allow corruption to flourish, their inherent unfairness in the employer rather than employee benefiting from personal ability and improvement – have been overlooked because it serves the system of producing bodies to play in top class football.

The argument runs that small clubs can stay in business by transferring players to big clubs. The player thus ascends the ladder on merit and small clubs are rewarded for helping them on their way. And everybody lives happily ever after. But what if the system is challenged successfully in court, in the manner of Bosman? Surely the practice would be judged as archaic, almost feudal and booted into the stand as if it were a tricky winger confronted by a Junior centre half with an abscessed tooth.

The inability of academies to produce ready-made players for the elite clubs means that it is not yet in their interest to abandon the system. The smaller clubs rely on the income from transfers to varying degrees so the only momentum for change would have to come from players. They would have to push to eradicate a system where vast sums of money go into the account of their erstwhile employers. The surest way of forcing change would be for every player to run down his contract but football contains and is surrounded by forces that would resist this strongly.

The world now contains a Stoke City than can spend £18m on a player. It is surely appropriate to ask where that money could go. To the player over the length of his contract? To development programmes that help boys and girls graduate to professional football? To lower admission prices for fans? To all of the above and to other beneficial initiatives…?

The revolution, though, may yet come. But for now the present system limps along and yet seems here to stay. A bit like poor old Derk, I suppose.