By the time you read this, transfer deadline day will have passed for the English Premier League (and English football in general). There will doubtless have been big money spent, and deals that nobody saw coming. We may finally have seen Coutinho leave Barcelona and head back to the Premier League, or Eriksen leave Tottenham Hotspur. Squads will be complete, and managers will now know exactly who they have at their disposal until Christmas. The Premier League may not have spent quite as much money this year as La Liga appears determined to, but the net amount of cash that will have changed hands will exceed one billion pounds. Not all of that money will turn out to have been spent wisely.
Transfer deadline day - and transfer windows in general - are popular with most fans. Many fans spend the day with a tab open on their web browser at work, trying to hide the fact that they're constantly pressing refresh from their boss. Soccer fans wait with bated breath, hoping to see that their team has landed that star striker or defender they desperately need in order to improve on last season's performance. It's unlikely that anyone will part with a sum of money higher than the $97m that Manchester United spent on center-back Harry Maguire, but that won't stop fans of Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and many other teams from dreaming. But should they?
When the transfer window was introduced, it was designed to bring stability to the game. Prior to its introduction, any team could buy or sell a player at any point of their choosing. If a striker got injured, his team could go out and buy a new one whenever they felt like it. If a new signing wasn't working out, he could be shipped off again before he even had time to unpack his bags. Players were treated as commodities, and teams with vast financial muscle could simply buy their way to a better performance all year round. With a transfer window, the idea was that contracts would be more likely to be honored, and soccer clubs would be more inclined to cultivate squads for the long term.
Despite those good intentions, things haven't worked out that way. The lack of synchronicity in transfer windows across the world means that there's always someone, somewhere who's able to buy and sell. This wasn't a major issue for the English Premier League until a season ago, when it was decided that the window would close in England earlier than it would elsewhere in Europe. Now, fans of English clubs will face an anxious wait to see if any Spanish teams come in and take one of their star players away before the Spanish window closes. If they do, they'll have no way of replacing them. It hasn't stopped big teams flexing their muscles to buy players either - but now they do it differently. Instead of buying additional players over the course of the season, they stockpile them. Manchester City and Chelsea, in particular, have so many players that they have entire squads out loan, picking up experience elsewhere because they have no prospect of breaking into the first team.
Transfer deadlines have also created a whole new phenomenon: The panic buy. In those final hours of the window, managers and chairmen get twitchy. They see their rivals strengthening, and feel obliged to try to match them. That leads to ill-thought-out moves being made, and money being spent without research being done. That's how players like Andre Santos ended up at Arsenal, and a clearly-injured Falcao went to Manchester United. Strategy goes out of the window, and recruitment becomes a big game of mobile slots. Mobile slots are a lot of fun, but anyone who claims to play them with a strategy is a liar. You're just putting in money at one end, and hoping you'll get more out at the other end. Mobile slots UK are a fine way to pass the time and entertain yourself, but they're no way to run a business - unless you happen to own a mobile slots website. If soccer clubs were honest with themselves, they'd admit that they have no idea how a lot of deadline day deals will work out. They're not done with the same meticulous planning that goes into making transfers during the rest of the window. It amounts t gambling, with a price tag of millions of dollars attached to each bet.
Instead of providing players with security, it can also turn them into prisoners. If a player now finds himself out of the team as the season kicks off, there's nothing he can do about it until 2020. He can no longer even pursue a loan move to another club. He just has to play (and possibly train) with the reserves, and hope that another club somewhere still remembers who he is when he goes looking for a move in January. Clubs have their hands tied, too. They might want to cut back on expenditure, or get rid of a player who isn't suited to their squad. They, too, have no option but to hang on until the window opens again.
Just because something is exciting doesn't necessarily mean it's a great idea. We'd miss the excitement of transfer deadline day if they were gone, but we'd still get excited about transfers. We might be even more excited, because you never know when one might be just around the corner. It would also put an end to agents being able to hold clubs to ransom because they know they're desperate to sign a player, and only have a limited window of time to do it in. How many times has a player come in for too much money, with an absurdly high salary, because an agent has had a club over a barrel as the hours have ticked away?
We suspect our views will fall on deaf ears. Deadline day - and transfer windows in general - are now ingrained into football culture. For better or for worse, the twice-yearly merry-go-round of transfers is destined to carry on forever. Just remember that when you're watching the new 'star' striker your club signed on deadline day struggle for form and fitness in his new environment, it might not have happened if the powers-that-be hadn't decided to put an arbitrary limit on when transfers can and cannot take place.
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