It’s not fair to say that this has been a quiet January for football’s billion-dollar signings. The month’s usual soundtrack – gathering whispers, ringing phones, the engine that produces live chyrons for breathless television shows that give life – may have been muted, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything to hear. Listen closely and you might hear the sound of a bubble popping.
The January transfer market is supposed to have a lot going for it, particularly in the Premier League, a place where money flows in such great torrents that it ends up being mapped out for almost any mistake. We expect—we want—the market to be a monument to instant gratification. We think it’s panicked. We don’t care if it’s a source of long and lasting regret.
And there are many things that should not be. Logical, for example. Restrained. Modest. This year, January was a month in which the most notable and expensive deal involved Tottenham Hotspur paying a perfectly reasonable price for a centre-back who joined manager Ange Postecoglou’s squad straight away.
It should come as no surprise, then, that this particular version of football’s equivalent of Black Friday has, at times, felt like something of a bust. A year ago, Chelsea were busy spending $132 million on Enzo Fernández. This time, the Premier League clubs parted with around $100 million between them during January.
There are several reasons for this. One is that the received wisdom has long held that January does not lend itself to value: most managers and executives now follow Groucho Marx’s inverted logic that any club actively selling in January is not worth buying. It is possible to land a carefully chosen target, of course, but it comes at a cost.
Given that most Premier League teams now have some semblance of long-term planning – and, indeed, the majority are still operating with the managers they had in the summer, another sign that the competition is getting smarter – only a great opportunity, or an immediate emergency need, may tempt them to pay that premium.
A second reason is the way the financial power of the Premier League has distorted the market. Most of its teams, understandably, don’t want to pay a lot of players to not play football. They prefer to change their teams, not inflate them. The problem is that few non-England teams can even afford to buy the rack favourites, and this effectively creates a bottleneck.
The third, and the one credited with having the biggest impact this month, is the sudden and very real specter of punishment for exaggeration. Everton have already been docked 10 points for failing to comply with Premier League financial regulations. A second charge now also hangs above, awaiting trial. At least in this, Everton are not alone. Nottingham Forest also face suspension.
There is no doubt that this has had some effect on the rest of the Premier League: Clubs, it seems, are acclimatising to an environment where there are real consequences for their actions.
Going into the final day of the window, more than half the league hadn’t spent a cent on permanent signings. Newcastle manager Eddie Howe and his current Manchester United counterpart Erik ten Haag were quick to blame the need to keep up with headliners Profit and Sustainability Rules for their squads’ inactivity this month.
How this should be considered has been a matter of intense debate. Everyone agrees that football must be sustainable. Clubs should not accumulate colossal debt in pursuit of short-term gratification. Teams should allow managers who use the time and space to implement their ideas, train their players, cover the talent from academies with expensive staff.
A line of thinking that goes against this basically boils down to equality and equality are not the same thing. The rules may hinder Manchester United in some ways, but their impact is far more pronounced at Newcastle. It is valid – though this is not the same as correct – to suggest that the effect of this reality appears much fairer from one angle than from another.
Much of the opposition, however, is rooted in something much simpler. Austerity just isn’t much fun. The Premier League and its fellow travelers in what could be described as the transfer industrial complex have spent decades feeding fans a steady diet of money being thrown at clubs with reckless abandon. Pretending that Morgan Rodgers leaving Middlesbrough for Aston Villa is worthy of a siren emoji just doesn’t cut it.
As disappointing as it must be, though, it’s hard to sympathize too much. As alien as it may sound, there was a time when transfers weren’t as central to the day-to-day existence of football as they are now.
England only adopted the current transfer window system in 2002. Before that, teams could sign players at any time until the end of March. (This idea, which had much more real sporting value, was introduced to prevent teams from strip-mining players from direct opponents.)
The theory was that doing so would engender stability: Coaches would know which players they could count on for huge chunks of the season. As it happens, however, it may well have backfired, creating an artificial deadline that turned both the summer and winter windows into increasingly mindless frenzies.
But more importantly, perhaps, what is happening in England is not unique. Nor is it, in any real sense, new, for anyone who happens to like football and is from any other country.
Of the many deals that fell through during January, the most instructive involved Lazio’s attempt and failure to sign Morgan Whittaker, a promising winger at English second-tier club Plymouth Argyle. To be clear: This is Lazio – the former employers of Hernán Crespo and Juan Sebastian Veron and Christian Vieri – who don’t have enough clout to take a player from England’s biggest city that has never hosted top-flight football.
This, however, is where much of Europe has been for some time now: looking for scraps from the Premier League board. More than anything else, this January is best presented as something between restoration and correction, bringing England back into line with everyone else.
In many ways, it is in everyone’s best interest to preserve this new reality. Premier League teams – the game’s top predators – benefit from the market easing, a bit: It means there’s more value for buyers and a wider customer base for sellers. Overall cost reduction does not reduce competitiveness, but helps make clubs more sustainable.
Whether it will work that way, however, is a different matter. January was quiet before. Three years ago, as the game was still reckoning with the financial shortfall caused by the coronavirus pandemic, England’s clubs turned off the taps, spending just a third of what they had the previous year. Within a year, they were back to breaking records. History suggests that this sound is not a bubble bursting. It is energy that is stored, compressed and combined, waiting to be released.
Scandal: Italian football is actually innovating
At the start of the season, it was highly unlikely that Juventus – still emerging from years of corruption allegations, points deductions and boardroom chaos – would challenge for the Serie A title.
The idea that he would do it with a team full of smart new things seemed almost impossible. Italian football is a conservative place, where players are still considered experienced well into their thirties, and even by those standards Juventus – and particularly their manager, the arch-pragmatist Max Allegri – aren’t exactly on trend to rely on youth.
And yet here we are: Juventus are just a point behind this weekend’s opponents, Inter, thanks in part to efforts from Fabio Miretti, Samuel Iling-Junior and Kenan Yildiz, none of whom would yet be big enough. to drink. in the United States.
As is often the case, their appearance can be traced in some ways to necessity – presumably if Juventus’ last few seasons hadn’t been so difficult they wouldn’t have been given a chance – but there’s innovation here too. .
In 2018, Juventus took advantage of a change in the rules of Italian football and began fielding a youth team, now renamed Juventus Next Gen, in the country’s third division. The idea was to expose some of its most promising young players to the kind of football that matters, away from the sterile atmosphere of youth games.
Miretti, Yildiz and Iling-Junior cut their teeth there, as did Matías Soulé (on loan for this season) and Nicolò Fagioli, whose rise was curtailed by his involvement in one of the occasional, but reliable, betting Italy’s scandals. There’s a message in this for all of Juventus’ peers and rivals: Doing things differently, just occasionally, pays off.
In many ways, it is admirable that Manchester United have responded to Marcus Rashford’s busy social calendar, so to speak, by at least considering the idea that the striker might need support rather than reflexively seeking punishment. By football standards, this is considered almost dangerously progressive.
It’s a shame that it’s undermined, a little, by the club’s – or at least their manager, Erik ten Haag’s – relatively tough stance on Jadon Sancho and various breaches of protocol. Perhaps they were materially worse than Rashford’s. Perhaps the context in which they occurred was obviously different. However, it at least creates the impression that discipline is something that happens to the consumable far more than necessary.
