The summer transfer window perhaps hasn’t been quiet as fraught as previous years, and Stan Collymore is happy about that.
For many years now, ‘deadline day’ has been the cue for people to sit glued to their screens for hours, waiting with baited breath to see who their club has signed.
Financial Fair Play and the need to stay within certain boundaries has seemingly put paid to any madness during the window, even though a large number of deals have still been done.
Whereas before it appeared that clubs would lean into their largesse and buy players for the sake of it, now they’re needing to take a much more rigid approach to buying and selling.
“It just goes to show that for Premier League clubs this summer, there’s a lot of creative accounting gymnastics going on,” Collymore told CaughtOffside for his exclusive column.
“I think it’s been a lukewarm window, and I think that I’m quite happy with that. The fact that clubs are having to look at alternative ways of creating squads and having to look for more value in the market is something that we’ve all been screaming for, for years.
“Now it’s happening, people seem to feel a little bit short changed because a club hasn’t spent half a billion, the Sky Sports News ticker hasn’t gone over a billion pounds for the window….
“There’s a degree of the Emperor’s New Clothes about the transfer window in that fans feel you’ve got to get three, four or five big name players in during every window to compete. You don’t.
“Because of the academies – where you can promote players – and because squads are big enough nowadays anyway.
“I actually think that my takeaway from this transfer window is that finally there’s some sort of common sense that has come back into English football, instead of turning on Sky Sports News and concerning ourselves with how many players have come in.
“That’s a very healthy thing.”
With FFP unlikely to change to any significant degree in the near future, perhaps the new way of conducting transfer business will be around for a good while yet.
It may actually encourage clubs to get the best out of the players they have rather than just bombing them out every so often in order that they can buy the new kid on the block.
Loyalty in football has long gone, but FFP might at least make all concerned to think again when it comes to the transfer windows.
The post “Common sense” – Stan Collymore pleased that it’s been a “lukewarm” transfer window appeared first on CaughtOffside.
