News
Time to put a brick through the transfer window
Published by Simon Head on February 2, 2008
The start of February is not usually the most significant time of year, but in English football, the 31st of January is like D-Day. That’s because when the calendar page turns and January becomes February, the dreaded transfer window slams shut.
But why have a transfer window?
Other than the media, who can plan their blanket coverage of the last-minute signings rush well in advance, I’m struggling to see any benefit to the window, especially for the clubs plying their trade in the lower leagues.
The Premier League is a different animal to the rest – and it’s there that I can actually see the window being of some merit. For one, it stops the big clubs snatching the best emerging players from their fellow Premier League rivals. It, to some degree, stops them from unsettling players with transfer talk mid-season too. There’s enough money in the Premier League for there to be a successful transfer window system, where clubs know when they can do business and when they simply have to make do with what they have. But you have to look at the bigger picture, and the health of the English game as a whole will be greatly improved if the transfer window is scrapped altogether.
While there is certainly an argument for the window being of benefit at Premiership level, it’s an entirely different story when you move down the leagues.
While the Premier League sides can throw around millions of pounds on signings (and on wages too), the teams in English football’s lower echelons are treading the tightrope between solvency and extinction. If a Premier League club spends £5million on a player who turns out to be a flop, their economies of scale mean they can absorb such an error with little fuss. But if a club like Gillingham spends £500,000 on a player who fails to perform, they’ll be counting the cost for many a season – and if they’re already in dire financial straits, that half-a-million could act as a millstone around the club’s neck.
The only way for lower league clubs to remain solvent is to produce talented players and sell them on. Crewe Alexandra have often been put forward as the perfect example of how to keep a small club at a relatively high level, thanks to their superb scouting system and youth policy, not to mention their relationship with the big clubs in their region. Clubs in Leagues One and Two need to regularly sell on their best talent in order to regenerate their own teams while trying to balance the books at the same time – and the transfer window effectively puts a handbrake on that happening.
If the transfer system was open, clubs could do business when they needed to, rather when forced to. In the current climate, selling clubs can hold buying clubs to ransom, or conversely, the selling clubs have to accept a lower fee than anticipated to secure any sort of deal at all. The final few days of the transfer window are very much like a game of poker, with both clubs involved in the deal looking to take full advantage of their counterpart’s (financial) weaknesses. Often the deals are still done, but not without one of the clubs blinking first. These transfer stand-offs happen all over the country on deadline day – and without the transfer window, they needn’t happen.
The transfer window has some element of noble thinking about it. The idea that each team does their business, then has to live or die by their decisions for the rest of the season is an idealistic one, but with all the money at the top end of the game, too many clubs could well die by their decisions – and that’s not in the best interests of the English game. Teams in big financial trouble are shackled by a draconian rule that seems to act to the detriment of the game and the clubs within it.
The solution? Put a brick through the transfer window and let English football return to an open transfer market. Then hopefully the teams at all levels of the game will have every opportunity they need to thrive.
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