Take it as red... the £35m Ox tale

Badge of pride: Oxlade-Chamberlain seals his move to Liverpool

It was the summer window of Monopoly spending, in which the value of paper currency was reduced to dust with each crazy passing day, and the extraordinary financial decisions kept coming to the very end.

Arsenal refused Manchester City’s £60million for a player who will be free to negotiate the terms of a free transfer four months from now and who does not even want to be at the club.

Fulham threatened to smash a Championship transfer record which has already fallen twice this summer by offering Newcastle £18m for Dwight Gayle.

Borussia Dortmund laid out £8m for a 17-year-old Londoner, Jadon Sancho, and made him their No 7. And Crystal Palace were willing to offer £23m and £120,000 a week for one of the most flawed defenders Manchester City have bought in their Abu Dhabi era.

But in the final, breathless reckoning, the merry-go-round did not deliver the deals deadline day had promised. A bottleneck obstructed the mechanism, because money counts for nothing when a club cannot replace what they will lose, the structure ground to halt.

Angel di Maria did not leave PSG for Monaco, who would not accept £92m for thomas Lemar from Arsenal, who would not trade Alexis Sanchez for those City petrodollars.

It means that at the end of the day, Nahki Wells finds his name up in lights. Burnley’s £5m buy from Huddersfield town was one of a handful of permanent signings by Premier League clubs yesterday.

Danny Drinkwater was on the brink of becoming the day’s most eye-catching deal for a fee of more than £30m, having arrived at Chelsea’s training ground late last night. But a £35m deal for Ross Barkley dramatically fell through because he changed his mind before his medical: an extraordinary development since the club’s interest was no surprise.

Chelsea signed torino’s Davide Zappacosta but lost out on Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, who made his anticipated £35m move from Arsenal to Liverpool, and Serge Aurier, who went from PSG to tottenham for £23m. Antonio Conte will still feel that he does not have enough.

the final 24 hours was a theatre of the absurd at times. Few moments summed up the unfettered madness of it all than Swansea City’s Bayern Munich loanee Renato Sanches asking for the No 85 jersey he wore at Benfica before his move to Germany.

the Premier League ruled this out, stating that squad numbers must be consecutive and close to the current highest number.

the madness was in rich supply elsewhere. A restless Diafra Sakho obeyed West Ham’s demands to return home from Rennes to train, only to be driven to Chelmsford racecourse where his agent’s horse was running. Leicester’s Riyad Mahrez was ‘spotted’ at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, expected at Barcelona airport but photographed at neither and did not get the move he wanted.

Crystal Palace were ready with £23m for City’s Eliaquim Mangala but the player’s indecision left him in Manchester, who could not bid for West Bromwich Albion’s Jonny Evans. City may rue the loss of Sancho to Dortmund.

the winners, as any director of football will tell you, are the ones who buy early. Manchester United were exemplary, capturing Romelu Lukaku and Nemanja Matic, and so too their £221.7m net spending neighbours, even though Arsenal swore blind that City had left the Sanchez approach too late.

City, whose frustrating last day should not obscure their early work, reflect the spending of a top flight window which surpassed the previous £1.16bn record levels 10 days ago. City’s £225.2m outlay is more than the total spend by all 20 Premier League clubs in the summer of 2004.

the deals needed time because — as senior City executives privately related after Leicester’s title success — the key consequence of the £5.1bn TV deal is that one-time selling clubs no longer play the game. Southampton kept Virgil van Dijk, in part because the new Chinese owners did not want immediate loss of face. Liverpool were holding tight to Philippe Coutinho last night.

Everton had to make Gylfi Sigurdsson one of the 30 most expensive players ever to prise him from

Swansea’s American owners. And yet he was still only the eighth biggest of 2017 at the time. Such are the insane economic consequences of that TV deal.

Five clubs — Arsenal, Burnley, Stoke, Tottenham and Swansea — spent less than they paid out, with Arsenal’s window nothing less than a car crash and Newcastle United’s £20.4m improvements insufficient to suggest anything less than a winter of conflict on Tyneside. They fended off Fulham’s interest in Gayle, at least.

But it was the individual best known for dealing late who had most to celebrate on deadline day. After a summer in which he collected £74.3m for five reserve players who scraped together only 57 Premier League games between them, Daniel Levy beat Chelsea to Swansea’s Fernando Llorente and introduced an exclusivity clause preventing the same London rivals hijacking the Aurier deal.

It was the less seasoned spenders whose nerve-ends were frayed. It was a surprise to find one of the net spenders picking up the phone yesterday evening. ‘We’re just sitting here,’ said a voice on the line. ‘Waiting for the dominoes to fall.’