The January transfer window is to the Premier League season what Boxing Day sales and summer vacation adverts are to Christmas Day. In the middle of one of the very best parts of the year, you are rudely pulled out of the moment with jarring reminders of a less festive and altogether more commercial world.
The wall-to-wall football that makes up the festive period in England is as good as the sport gets. The now-tiresome scuttlebutt that comes with the window—and its anticlimactic deadline day in particular—is just about the opposite.
