At last, a plan that benefits fans – not the money men
With players holding clubs to ransom and supporters cheering teams still unfinished, the call to close the transfer window earlier should be applauded
For 15 years, football results in August have needed an asterisk. The teams we watch until the summer transfer window closes are provisional, conditional. Supporters pay to see an unfinished version of their team, as if they are buying a flat off-plan.
Take Liverpool, Swansea City, Arsenal, Leicester City or Southampton – who all have big-name so-called contract rebels. In all those cases, the fans are not watching the team they love. They are observing indecision, agent agitation, fee-wrangling, player restlessness and moves elsewhere in the market that may shape their particular trading position.
Philippe Coutinho at Liverpool is a classic example. Neymar moves to Paris St-germain and suddenly Barcelona are in hot pursuit of probably Liverpool’s best player.
Equally, every step taken by Arsenal is shadowed by a question: will Alexis Sanchez be there on Sept 1? If yes – hallelujah. If not – Arsenal are a completely different side. And before either of those possibilities come to pass, Arsenal might have played three Premier League games.
Virgil van Dijk, Ross Barkley, Gylfi Sigurdsson, whose move to Everton appears complete, Coutinho and Sanchez all missed the first round of Premier League fixtures – with Riyad Mahrez (the “wantaway maverick”) the only one of the restless brigade to have turned up.
As for Diego Costa, where do you start? Asked for a transfer last summer, told in January he would be sold, told by text at the end of the last season he was done for, told to report for training this week at Chelsea. Costa, admittedly, is his own mad opera. But he fits the picture English club football is increasingly willing to face up to, which is that having a transfer window that stays open for 21 days after the first Premier League match is a recipe for mayhem.
The fetishisation of transferdeadline day, with its countdown clock, nausea-inducing news loops and long voids where precisely nothing happens would not be lost to our TV culture. The accounting firms who deluge us with studies about how much was spent and what it means would still have their day in the sun. But for the most part, this would all happen before the games had started, assuming the
Premier League approves a plan to impose a ban on its 20 clubs buying players once the campaign has kicked off. The details have yet to be seen, but the idea is a good one.
For Paul Clement, the Swansea manager, August would not be Sigurdsson month. There would not be a gaping hole in his plans, or anxiety across the club about how to replace him, and at what cost. At the same time, Southampton would be deprived of the chance to play hard ball with other English clubs over Van Dijk, though they could still sell him overseas. Again – rejoice.
The flaw in the scheme, to be debated on Sept 7, is that European rivals could still feast on players registered in England. A new domestic transfer-window closing date would not apply abroad. Hence, critics maintain, Barcelona could keep up their pursuit of Coutinho until Aug 31, which would deprive Liverpool of the chance to replace him.
Well, yes, except Liverpool could tell all agents, all players, that Aug 10 say, was the new cut-off – and that a Coutinho could not be sold beyond that date because the club would be bound by the new English regulations (from 2018-19) to stop spending before the curtain lifted.
Some context. Transfer windows were proposed in a vanished age, in 2002 when Lennart Johansson was Uefa president. The European Commission was involved. There was never an obligation on the organisers of a competition – in this case the Premier League – to observe a single global window. Hence the variety of dates across Europe and beyond. Accepting parameters that destabilised its businesses, the Premier League has witnessed a 15-year escalation of disorder. Nobody can hang their hat on a peg in August because the hats and the pegs keep moving around. The first three games are a phoney war, a sideshow to the news cycle of maybes and what-ifs. It is a slightly more exciting version of the house market chain. Another argument against closing the proposal is that English clubs will be charged even more as European sellers exploit Premier League urgency. But this might do England’s clubs some good, by forcing them to plan further ahead and stop paying way over the odds, which French and German rivals now automatically assume they will do (with good reason). You need no knowledge of the Weimar Republic to know that any business where people pay £50 million for something that is worth £20 million is storing up trouble for itself.
Closing the window earlier would not cure other ailments: the scandalous fees paid to agents or the squeeze on first-team opportunities for young home-grown players. It will not curb wage hyper-inflation, bring down ticket prices or stop clubs being bought by speculators as global portfolio entries. But it might stop the first three weeks of the season needing that asterisk. Even in this Wild West economic culture, you are meant as fans to get what you pay for – in this case, from Aug 11 – not what agents, players and owners decide you should get three weeks later. Next year, Spurs will just have to get a move on.