Premier League vote to close transfer window before the start of 18/19 season

[Kinky Gerbil]

Didn't the 'smaller' clubs generally back this? Petro dollar clubs love the long window, as their budget means they can bankroll last minute unsettling and grabbing of players.

There won't be a mad dash in WC years. Everything will simply be done earlier. Recruitment teams and directors aren't idle on transfers until the moment the window opens. Every ex player admits that tapping up goes on many months before the official opening of the window and we know that many agents/players families have a non existent ethical code. So in reality preparation for deals goes on well in advance of the official window.

We can still have the fun, it will be a dramatic Thursday each year.

I can see clubs being held to ransom, which won't be an issue for the richer clubs.

Guess we will just have to wait and see...

 

[Driver8]

SSN reporting this like the death of a relative.

 

[poidy]

Good luck to the Play-Off Winning Championship team on having just 10 weeks to assemble a Prem-standard squad.

We'd be ****ed.

Can't get a striker in 18 weeks, got no chance of doing it in 10.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Blue Valkyrie]

We'd be ****ed.

Can't get a striker in 18 weeks, got no chance of doing it in 10.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The transfer window will 'slam open' earlier and will still last the same 12 weeks that it is open now.

 

[Invicta]

Thank god - we can maybe concentrate on football !

 

[graz126]

Just shifts the problem to a different date as far as I'm concerned. The brinkmanship will now just transfer from 31st Aug to the eve of the season for PL clubs. Add in the fact that this rule does NOTHING to stop other clubs in Europe from making offers and unsettling PL players right up till the window closes a few weeks later, and I don't really see what PL clubs have gained out of this. Sure, domestically it'll stop the trading after the season starts, but it wouldn't have prevented (for example) the Coutinho-to-Barca saga from dragging on and on till deadline day.

This solves nothing IMO, just shifts the problem elsewhere in the calendar and brings some other logistical complications into play.

Same thoughts from me. I think it is stupidity at it best

 

[West Upper Seagull]

....and for the XBox / PS4 game players out there this may mean that the new season edition of FIFA will get released earlier as a result of the transfers being sorted earlier !!

 

[OzMike]

About time, now things will get more realistic and games up till January will not be wasted.
Common sense prevails at last.

 

[HastingsSeagull]

Will only work if ALL other nations follow suit. Why is Europe such a distinction?

Do hope that becomes the case though.

 

[brightn'ove]

I can see clubs being held to ransom, which won't be an issue for the richer clubs.

Guess we will just have to wait and see...

Personally, I don't agree. Clubs won't sell if they can't get a replacement. Liverpool didn't sell Coutinho to Barca despite ridiculously large offers because they knew that they couldn't replace him. Imo, if clubs hold firm in that first year and send the message that no players will leave after the season starts (unless they are surplus to requirements) then foreign clubs will know they will have to either give up or part with obscene amounts of money.

 

[studio150]

Any less time for the rodneys to go into melt centeral over over priced foriegners fine by me. should sign more english anyways

Regards
DR

Why more English players, do you not want the Albion to do well.

So in your world the Albion should not have brought

Calderon
Bruno
Kuipers
Penny
Ryan
Grealish
Smith
Lawrenson

or any of the non English players who have played for the Albion over the years.

 

[Easy 10]

Bit wordy, but a good lunchtime read and Samuel has this spot on

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...IN-SAMUEL-turkeys-really-voted-Christmas.html

The turkeys really have voted for Christmas with the decision to close the transfer window early

Winter is coming. Anyone who watches Game of Thrones gets that. But do you know why it is coming? Why there is some ominous, looming, if unspecified date when the cold and the white walkers will arrive? It’s the first rule of dramatic script-writing. You need an internal deadline, a plot timer. You need some mechanism that is chasing your characters down.

Cinematic deadlines are often obvious: two days to save the planet, five minutes or the bomb goes off, High Noon. But great drama is set against the clock, too. Walter White’s cancer in Breaking Bad; Michael Corleone’s plans rushing to beat Cuba’s revolution in The Godfather Part II; hell, The Dark Knight is just a succession of deadlines, right down to the romantic sub-plot. Such devices are there for a simple reason: deadlines add motivational tension. And the tighter the better.

So a big round of applause for the Premier League’s stakeholders, who have turned scriptwriter and certainly ratcheted it up a notch next summer. On Thursday, at their annual meeting, 14 turkeys really did vote for Christmas. A majority of Premier League clubs decided that, no, they couldn’t be trusted to get their business done in reasonable time before the season started, and no, they couldn’t be relied upon not to unscrupulously raid a rival given the opportunity, so the transfer window would close the Thursday before next season begins.

August 9, 2018, at 5pm to be precise. So, with the World Cup final scheduled to take place on July 15, this gives English clubs little more than three weeks from tournament’s end to cessation of business; 25 days to get all their post-World Cup transfers done. Except it doesn’t.

This is a unilateral arrangement, meaning every major league in Europe gets more than three weeks once the English window closes to unsettle, raid, negotiate and generally steal a march on their Premier League rivals.

The English ban is on buying, not selling. So a squad can be weakened, but not improved. Players can still claim to be injured to force a move, agents can still make promises to wrangle their client a better deal abroad — this summer’s dramas around Philippe Coutinho or Diego Costa would be no different. We just can’t buy. It is quite the most foolish rule English football has passed, and there have been some contenders.

You think this summer was crazy? Think about next year. Say a club are targeting a player who has had a good World Cup and is wanted abroad, too. The difference being the English club have until August 9 to get the deal done, while those in Spain and Italy have until August 31. Who is more likely to be panicking and under pressure, who is more likely to bid over the odds, to pay wasteful fortunes to agents to hurry it all up? English clubs will once more be the mugs of Europe.

Take, for example, Jan Vertonghen or Mousa Dembele at Tottenham. Both have contracts that expire in 2019 and, if agreement cannot be reached, it seems likely the club will sell next summer, rather than let either player go on a free.

Yet Vertonghen and Dembele will be in Russia with Belgium then. They are a good team and could go deep — certainly to the weekend of July 7 when the quarter-finals are played, and maybe beyond. Unless business was concluded before the competition began — when both men would still be on international duty, and preparing for a World Cup — Premier League clubs will have a month to get a deal done. Seems time enough.

Yet the players could also have suitors in Spain, or Italy. And those clubs could tell an agent to hold, to wait for an offer, to let it play out. Say one was wanted in Spain. That club might have business to do yet, players to get off the books, because La Liga’s window is still open. And while all this is going on, at a thoughtful pace befitting a transaction in tens of millions, the English clubs would be anxiously looking at the calendar and trying to go higher and higher to force the deal.

Indeed, the only way to compete would be escalation — and all caused by an arbitrary deadline, introduced because our clubs could not be trusted to behave with grace, dignity and common sense.

An agreement — not even formalised, but bound by honour — that stopped Premier League clubs raiding each other beyond the Thursday before the season started would have had the same effect, without the need for red tape. But, no — leave a loophole and it will be exploited. We have to be boxed in. We must be regulated. We can’t just be smart: buy early and treat rivals with respect.

Do we really think we’ll be good at this? Leicester couldn’t get one deal over the line this summer given three months. They sold Danny Drinkwater and managed to miss the deadline for registering his replacement, Adrien Silva, by 14 seconds — even with a two-hour extension. Daniel Levy will merely hold out until the last minute on August 9, rather than August 31. The business will be no different, just harder and more expensive to complete. English clubs will be at the mercy of agents, of players, of sellers, and it was all so unnecessary.

As Liverpool and Southampton proved, the transfer window shuts any time you want it to, really, with the utterance of one word: no.

 

[Chicken Run]

So does this decision by the premier league include Football League clubs

 

[beorhthelm]

Bit wordy, but a good lunchtime read and Samuel has this spot on

you've misspelled "melodramatic". reckon its generally a good thing, as the Premier League clubs who are in the best position to judge. its going to affect a couple of players top foreign teams are interested in, but they'll know there's no replacements so very unlikely to get a deal, so have to either get business done early or wait. the media might not like it because they'll less drama and speculation to feed on in August.

 

[Postman Pat]

This is bad news for clubs Newly promoted clubs and clubs with smaller budgets.

It will push prices up and how are you meant to get players in to improve squads in a short amount of time?

4 weeks after the World Cup next summer before the season starts.

Also - transfer windows are quite fun.

I would be interested to see how the clubs voted.

Fourteen Premier League clubs voted in favour of the amendment, the minimum needed for the plans to be approved. Manchester United, Manchester City, Watford, Swansea and Crystal Palace voted against, while Burnley abstained.

 

[Easy 10]

you've misspelled "melodramatic". reckon its generally a good thing, as the Premier League clubs who are in the best position to judge. its going to affect a couple of players top foreign teams are interested in, but they'll know there's no replacements so very unlikely to get a deal, so have to either get business done early or wait. the media might not like it because they'll less drama and speculation to feed on in August.

It DOES put PL clubs over a barrel though when competing with foreign clubs for a players signature. Everyone will know that the PL club is working to a far tighter deadline to get the deal over the line. The foreign club can have a word with the agent and say "hang back, just let their deadline pass, then we'll trump them and agree x y z with you and your player". The PL clubs are going to have to throw even sillier money at a deal in order to ward that off.

 

[Tooting Gull]

It DOES put PL clubs over a barrel though when competing with foreign clubs for a players signature. Everyone will know that the PL club is working to a far tighter deadline to get the deal over the line. The foreign club can have a word with the agent and say "hang back, just let their deadline pass, then we'll trump them and agree x y z with you and your player". The PL clubs are going to have to throw even sillier money at a deal in order to ward that off.

It's an interesting one, and my honest opinion is that we won't know until we have seen one in practice - and anyone, including Martin Samuel, who says otherwise is guessing or lying.

There are various ways all the parties could react, and I maintain that at least one of those is positive. The last-minute throwing money at the problem goes on now. This system would have stopped the uncertainty and disruption over Van Dijk and Sigurdsson. But it would have done nothing about the Coutinho saga (in fact that would have been worse, with no replacement possible).

But there are good possible outcomes. The rest of Europe could follow. The 'late swoops' from Europe could be fended off by our higher wages, apart from the odd superstar coveted by PSG, Barcelona or Real Madrid.

I think it will reduce uncertainty overall, but I could be wrong and if so then this time next year the PL chairmen will presumably be scrapping it again. Worth a try though.

 

[Nathan]

So does this decision by the premier league include Football League clubs

Nope, just PL. At the moment.

 

[Easy 10]

It's an interesting one, and my honest opinion is that we won't know until we have seen one in practice - and anyone, including Martin Samuel, who says otherwise is guessing or lying.

There are various ways all the parties could react, and I maintain that at least one of those is positive. The last-minute throwing money at the problem goes on now. This system would have stopped the uncertainty and disruption over Van Dijk and Sigurdsson. But it would have done nothing about the Coutinho saga (in fact that would have been worse, with no replacement possible).

But there are good possible outcomes. The rest of Europe could follow. The 'late swoops' from Europe could be fended off by our higher wages, apart from the odd superstar coveted by PSG, Barcelona or Real Madrid.

I think it will reduce uncertainty overall, but I could be wrong and if so then this time next year the PL chairmen will presumably be scrapping it again. Worth a try though.

You're right insofar as nobody really knows exactly how this will play out. Every deal is different, and with so many parties involved, all with their own vested interests, there's a myriad of scenarios that could occur. Fundamentally though, we are now in a market with one set of rules for ourselves, and another set of rules for everyone else. I can't see how that's going to play to our advantage, as PL clubs can only now be weakened between the start of the season and the close of the window, never strengthened.

Imagine if we're still in the PL next season (ok, bear with me), and our season has just started. A few weeks before the transfer window shuts, someone abroad puts a HUGE offer in for our prize asset Izqueirdo, who's been absolutely ripping it up. And he wants the move. Yes, we CAN say no, and I'd certainly hope we would. But we all know how these things often pan out once a players head has been turned, and then that stuffs us till January.

It also by that stage bins off any cash-plus-player exchange deals that we could've negotiated.

I'm not against the idea in principal of drawing a line under bringing in more players once the season has started. But without it being a unilateral agreement across all the major European leagues, its going to leave us at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to dealing with foreign clubs.