Hello. I don't often post on here because it can get a bit heated but I wanted to share some quotes from George Elek's interview about the January transfer window with Mark Bonner, which I just read this morning. It certainly talks about all of the themes that have been debated here over the past couple of days.
I'm sharing because I found it really interesting. I hope you do too. Kudos to NTT20 for continuing to produce stuff like this.
Bonner says, among other things...
"It’s just the hardest window. There’s a smaller time frame, a smaller pool of players to choose from, and more competition for those players as a consequence. It becomes a much harder window to do business in.
It’s also so dependent on other teams getting their business done to enable you to do yours. So it’s very, very constrained, I think, which creates huge challenges for everybody. But it is the challenge of the season to try and come out of the window in a better position.
By the time you get to January, you’re probably really clear on what your squad needs. You go into it knowing what you want out of the window. But anything can happen in that Christmas period and can change the strategy quite dramatically. And therefore you have to be ready for anything and have lists prepared for every position.
The truth really is that things change. The number of players who get injured in the six weeks leading up to a window can change everything. A player who was once available suddenly isn’t; someone who was out of favour is back in the team; or a forward who hasn’t scored for months suddenly scores three over Christmas and is no longer going anywhere in January.
All those things can crop up and make the window much tougher. And so you have to be quite reactive, more so than anyone would want to be.
And everybody’s quite non-committal going into January. It’s a similar lead up to the summer window. Everybody’s finding out who might be available, what interest there might be for a player, what a deal might look like.
But you probably get zero commitment from the parent club, zero commitment from the buying club, zero commitment from the agent, zero commitment from the player, because everyone knows how quickly things change.
The truth, probably, is that signings made really early are the ones that haven’t got huge competition for their services, or are being paid extortionate sums. Some can be done if they’ve been a long time in the making. And certainly some can be done early if the player comes from a league outside of England where the season has already ended.
Then there are some clubs and players in a position where they know they stand to gain the longer the window goes on, and the more desperate clubs get. The other side of that is things can change so quickly you can get to the 23rd of December and think ‘we’ve got a couple lined up ready to go’, but then the club has got five games before the window really comes alive on the fifth of January.
And in that five games, players will get injured, players will get suspended, players will come into the team that weren’t expecting to and do well. Managerial changes will happen. All of these considerations can skew the window so much, and business that you think you’ve got ready either falls through or just isn’t available anymore.
The final part of the puzzle is everyone wants to do their business early, but very few do. And therefore one club won’t sell a player until they get their new player in and that creates the problem straight away.
I remember back to the Great Escape at Cambridge, when we signed Michael Morrison from Portsmouth. We’d agreed that deal in December, but he didn’t join until later in January because of the business that they needed to do to get players in. And so you get a little bit peppered for not having anything ready to go, but you’ve actually got a player ready; they just can’t join you. And I think that’s the truth of the window as well: people in clubs want the same as fans, but we also understand the reality of how hard that can be sometimes.
You can’t say every bit of criticism [about slow business] isn’t valid, because sometimes it is. But also you can understand why people in football can’t say a lot of this stuff out loud. One, because until something’s done, you’re dealing with some sensitive contractual things. And two, because you don’t want to alert anyone until a deal is done.
I have had plenty of experiences of thinking a player is arriving for a medical, ringing me 20 minutes before and telling me they’re diverting and going somewhere else. That has happened to me three times. And therefore you want as few people as possible to know until it’s done, because it’s so hard signing players, and it takes miles longer than it should, and miles longer than you wish it would. That’s just the nature of the beast.
And then ultimately, football is really expensive. Usually you are relying on a generous owner putting their money in. Signings don’t come from anywhere else. So the industry itself makes it harder and harder because the financial constraints every club is under mean the game is not sustainable. So it’s a very challenging environment."
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