Shut that window!
Transfer windows are a failure and should be abolished. They restrict freedom and add to football's financial chaos.
The idiot with the dildo ruined it. Sky Sports News had turned transfer deadline day into tremendous theatre with live reports from outside of stadiums and training grounds. It was great fun but it was always asking for trouble. Sure enough, in 2014, live on air, a man pushed a dildo against the ear of a reporter who was giving the latest rumour on the possibility of Tom Cleverley moving from Manchester United to Everton. My sympathy was with the reporter Alan Irwin who wasn’t allowed to punch the guy for our televisual entertainment, unlike when a similar incident happened in Italy with a banana. Scrapping those mad scrums was taken out of Sky’s hands by the regulator OFCOM, who received multiple complaints about obscene chanting and the brandishing of sex toys.
My question is why the August and January deadline exist at all, especially in the era of financial fair play. If a club wants to sign a left-back, and everyone involved agrees, then why can’t it happen in November or February? The transfer window is utterly artificial and has had the unintended consequence of creating biannual deadlines on which wisdom flies out of the window. The food chain dictates that the richest clubs set the pace, waiting until the last day or two to strike their deals, creating a log jam that bursts in the final hours of the 31st. Football doesn’t need that chaos, especially now it’s not as much fun with Sky’s reporters stationed inside the high fences of clubs’ extensive training complexes, lonely and cold, waiting for a press officer to confirm whether that deal for the left-back has been done. The glory days are gone.
We have the European Commission to thank for transfer windows and even the most ardent pro-Europeans should be awake to the possibility of that august organisation producing legislation that is a dog’s dinner, failing to achieve its aims and creating its own chaos. If you are proposing a restraint of freedom, trade or otherwise, the onus is on you to make a watertight case for why it would make things substantially better than doing nothing. When I ask people who advocate for the preservation of the windows for their reasons, they say it’s about stability. I don’t even think it achieves that.
Look at Chelsea’s mad rush. Todd Boelhy has that money burning a hole in his pocket but why does he have to spend it before midnight on January 31st? The real enemy, as I see it, is the financial imbalance between clubs and leagues that kills competition; cramming transfer activity into a small timeframe only increases pressure. Panic sets in. The growth of transfer fees has been considerably higher than the growth of broadcast revenues while the money paid by football clubs to agents continues to rise. Whatever the European Commission, FIFA and UEFA thought they would achieve, transfer windows don’t create a healthy environment. Can you name a bad deal struck on transfer deadline day? Of course you can, because there are loads of them. I would rate Liverpool signing Andy Carroll for £35m as the lowest point although remembering that Middlesbrough bought Afonso Alves still causes me to shudder.
Why not switch the other way and have just one window that closes early in the season and obligate clubs to get set with a balanced squad for the whole campaign, possibly with exceptions for emergency loans for proven injury crises? I think that’s unfair. A manager who is appointed in the summer already faces an unreasonable task to assess their squad and get the necessary deals done by the end of August. Give them time to make their choices and sign players when they’re ready.
Would abolishing the January window make clubs less inclined to sack managers? Perhaps, because the existence of the winter transfer window does create the late autumn sacking window. Firing a manager in January is seen as a sign of a badly run club; note that Everton appointed Frank Lampard on January 31st, 2022, and Sean Dyche on January 30th 2023. Managers are sacked too often in my opinion but there is a time when change is necessary, and it is surely reasonable for the new guy to be able to reshape the squad.
What really makes the notion of transfer windows for me is the existence of various financial fair play measures. The whole point of FFP is to stop club owners risking the future of the institutions that they have temporary charge of; if FFP works, then transfer windows are redundant. Take La Liga where clubs are given a strict budget to work within, based on the league’s interpretation of their income. Doing deals is tough so why not allow them to happen throughout of the season, up to, say, the old deadline of March? Remember, to restrict any freedom you need to have a very strong case that it is better than allowing people to act as they see fit.
Tom Cleverley didn’t join Everton on the day of the dildo in 2014. Manchester United had been busy in the transfer market after appointing Louis van Gaal that summer and didn’t decide whether they needed Cleverley until the end of the window. Both Everton and Aston Villa were keen to take him but ran out of time to negotiate a deal. He moved to Villa on loan in a deal that was registered in the early hours of the following morning after the club showed they had completed the paperwork before midnight. He ended up at Everton a year later, on a free transfer. Would it really have created a whole new mass of financial chaos in football if Tom Cleverley had been given a couple of days to make an informed decision about his career?