The essential weirdness of the transfer window

Football is a soap opera, so it was always inevitable that the drama of transfer deadline day should have taken on a life of its own.

Another two-parter for you this morning. Above the cut, a piece on the weirdnesses of the transfer window. Below it for paid subscribers, a little more detail on the history of how we got to this state of affairs.

When transfer deadline day comes around these days, I’m tempted to wonder whether the extent to which we criticise its excesses is a case of recency bias. There’s a lot of talk of ‘hysteria’ in the media, but while it obviously doesn’t warrant the sensationalism afforded it by the tabloid press, talk radio and pay-TV… my personal take on it isn’t quite one of derision.

I mean, it’s derision. But not quite. Transfer deadline day used to be twenty times as ridiculous as it is today. I mean praise the lord, at least this sort of thing doesn’t happen any more. Don’t be Peter Odemwingie on transfer deadline day. That’s not a bad motto by which to live your life. And so far as I’m aware, this sort of thing doesn’t either. There may be no clip more representative of the 21st century than that in a sense that stretches far beyond football.

But while the January transfer deadline still doesn’t quite match the August one in terms of attention or money spent—which shouldn’t be surprising, considering that clubs have had a full three months worth of spending to finish off, as opposed to the one, mid-way through the season—it might even be a more important one, in some respects.

By the 1st January, we know a lot of squads’ shortcomings throughout the first half of a season. For those clubs missing key components to their squads, this is your chance. This would be enough on its own, but we all know that there’s an added layer of intrigue to this, in that everybody knows what everybody else needs, too, and that time is short.

It’s like an episode of The Traitors in which who is and isn’t a traitor changes every couple of hours. You can’t afford to look too desperate, but Sunderland very clearly were in 2019 when looking for a striker to push on in their bid to get back into the Championship following two successive relegations. Their pursuit of Will Grigg, painfully recorded by the Netflix documentary series Sunderland ‘til I Die, remains the high water mark for this sort of behaviour.

Wigan Athletic in this particular episode of the programme might just be football’s greatest ever ‘unseen character’, pushing up the price as the whites of Sunderland’s eyes became increasingly clear before finally he finally went for a jaw-dropping £3m, at the time the highest transfer fee ever paid by an English third-tier club.

And in one of football’s great comedy codas. Because comedy equals tragedy plus time, Grigg went on to be a disaster for Sunderland, scoring eight goals in 61 games. Even now, the suspicion remains that this could all have happened because of the “Will Grigg’s On Fire” song; it’s tempting to think that Stewart Donald may have taken the words to that song rather too much at face value. The whole episode was certainly an object lesson in Shiny New Thing Syndrome.

As for the idea that some clubs have had a ‘good window’ while others have had a ‘bad’ one… well, steady on there Piet de Visser, transferring footballers from one club to another in the real world is a complicated business, with a lot of moving parts. The player has to get along with his new head coach and team-mates. He may be required to slot, quite possibly almost immediately, into position in a team alongside unfamiliar players, and in a game of fine margins, that can matter.

The player concerned may have a partner and/or children to move (increasingly often to another club, and quite probably at extremely short notice), and all may need time to adjust to a new area, city, or culture. Or he could end up living out of a suitcase in a swanky hotel until the end of the season. A young man in peak physical condition earning tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds a week in that position? What could possibly go wrong?

It’s complicated, and all the analytics in the world can’t mask that there will always be an element of crapshoot about it all because, fundamentally, human beings are human beings and even human beings in the finest physical condition and with the greatest sporting technique can have it them to act erratically or at least not as per the intended script. And that’s a good thing. It’s a lifeline of hope to all bar the richest.

While the insolvency and maltreatment of football clubs should always be a scandal, at the level at which most are focusing their attention these are not ‘clubs’ in any meaningful sense. They’re corporations. Were there to be a Premier League club to end up over-stretched financially into insolvency—and this has happened before, lest us not forget—the amounts of money required for it to happen would be so astronomical as to be beyond any community rescue. And even if the worst happened, a fallen megaclub would pop up again somewhere else.

The amounts of money are so high at that level of the game are now so high that the only way to treat it all at the highest level is to consider it a soap opera. Dynasty, hosted by Jim White. Because numbers aren’t really numbers that anyone can relate to any more, it’s increasingly difficult to take them seriously. Manchester City spent £177m in the transfer window. Does that number make any sense? Of course it doesn’t. It’s absurd. Might they break financial regulations? Given the way in which this day has taken on a life of its own and other arguments over PSR, does it really matter anyway?

The transfer window has its own ecosystem because that’s what football does. There are people who are only interested in ‘winning’ a transfer window, and that’s fine. We all obsess over some tangential aspect of the game or other. Transfers will never become more important than the game itself, even if some of the media coverage might make it feel like they could.