The transfer window has once again, in the excitable vernacular of Sky Sports News presenters, “slammed shut”. The sticking plaster of new signings is no longer available. Managers will now have to rely on old fashioned constructs such as tactics, training and motivation. Credit cards back in wallets, gents. Cones out on the practice pitches.
But which teams had a good window? And who got a bit spend happy in the hot weather? Too Good give its two cents on the best and the worst of the business conducted in football’s summer marketplace…
It is one of the game’s great curiosities that everything gets done at the very last moment in the transfer window. Whether this is due to the relative infancy of a restrictive window[1], brinksmanship, teams getting caught in a chain of purchases, or a combination of all three, you would struggle to find another setting where hundreds of millions of pounds are spent in a less orderly fashion. Investments that will make or break a season (careers, even) are thrashed out via the charmingly obsolete method of facsimile while the available hours and minutes ebb away. Too Good knows little about the fast food industry, but we would be more than a touch surprised if, minutes before shop opening hours, McDonalds’ franchisees were still frantically scrambling around for beef patties.
It was therefore pleasing to see Manchester City do their business early and effectively this summer. Whether you agree with their signings or not[2], City’s ability to get the job done long before the September 2nd bun-fight was most gratifying. Less than a decade ago, “Manchester City” and “businesslike” would show up together about as often as the phrases “John Prescott” and “twerking”. More and more, though, the club seem to approach things in a timely and professional manner.
By contrast, it is a testimony to Scottish thrift that the first new manager of Manchester United in over quarter of a century couldn’t seem to liberate his wallet from his trouser pocket until the very last day of the window. Even then, like many of his compatriots, Moyes must have been at the malt when he finally managed to prise open the purse strings.
Rare are the days I look to Robbie Fowler for thoughts and inspiration on the beautiful game. However, like a broken watch, the former Scouse marksman was bang on for a brief moment when he said that “Marouane Fellaini is a good player … just not a Manchester United player”. I couldn’t agree more. There’s something unseemly about the league’s showpiece team signing a player who is best known for “causing a lot of problems” for opposition teams and generally being “a bit of a handful”. These are not the deft words of precision football that are synonymous with Manchester United. These are mid-table words. Words that aren’t necessarily bad in the right context, but Moyes needs to recognise that a change in mindset is in order. Managing Manchester United is only the same as managing Everton in the way that an evening under the bed sheets with Jessica Alba is the same as one with Kerry Katona. On one level, they’re identical. But, on a fundamentally more important level, they really aren’t. You’re shopping in Waitrose now Moyesy; buy the best eggs available.
Arsenal have put all of their eggs in one rather delightful, if a touch pricey, basket. Mesuit Ozil will provide lashings of guile and vision in the middle of the Emirates’ park. It must have killed Arsene Wenger to sanction a cheque of that size. But Ozil is no Francis Jeffers or Antonio Reyes. This is a German international at the peak of his career. Wenger is a border-town boy, only falling within the French boundaries by the width of one of his spindly fingers. With Ozil joining fellow international team-mates Per Mertesacker and Lukas Podolski, all of a sudden Arsene’s beloved Gunners have a distinctly Teutonic feel. And Germans have a habit of winning football matches.
Too Good would like to have heard another bleep of Wenger’s barcode-scanner that ensured Olivier Giroud stayed in a tracksuit and on the bench for the forthcoming season. Maybe Yaya Sanogo will do this. Sanogo is a raw 20 year old without a full season to his name. But with an eye-opening 10 goals in 13 league appearances for Auxerre last year, Too Good is pinning its rosette for “Potential Find of the Summer” on the lanky French youngster. This year might still be a little early for Sanogo. However, if there is one place you would want to learn your craft when you’re a young French footballer with buckets of potential, it’s ensconced in the warm bosom of Monsieur Wenger. All in all, good job, Arsene.
Rather than buying a youthful striker with bags of potential, Chelsea instead chose to get rid of one. Romelu Lukaku was farmed out to Everton for 12 months and four-time African Player of the Year, Samuel Eto’o (now nearly 33), has been asked to do Lukaku’s job instead. Chelsea’s quota of out-and-out centre forwards therefore remains at a paltry three (Eto’o, Torres and Ba). One old, one crocked and one that was never good enough in the first place. If this doesn’t concern Jose Mourinho, it really should do. Eto’o is the only member of the triumvirate that can be relied upon. Even then, whether Eto’o’s undoubted ability is still there despite his advancing years is a question to be answered.
——
I’ve been on enough dates in my time to recognise the look of someone who doesn’t really want to be somewhere. All the best restaurants and sharpest chat-up lines aren’t enough when the object of your affection just doesn’t have their heart in it. Tottenham Hotspur saw Gareth Bale staring into the middle distance and rightly got down to the business of demanding the biggest fee possible to compensate for their jilting. £86 million is a phenomenal figure and Daniel Levy is to be praised to the hilt for squeezing Real Madrid like a sponge. Madrid’s adolescent attitude to money is exactly how I would behave if I was implicitly backed by the Spanish government and, as a result, Spurs have been granted a fantastic war-chest. Sensibly, they took a calculated gamble on the sale of Bale and brought in a wealth of talented reinforcements based on the expected proceeds. It is now up to Andre Villa-Boas to mold his new team and heave them that all-important one step further up the premier league ladder.
A wise footballing prophet decreed in May of this year that James McCarthy and Aroune Kone would be shrewd buys, available at affordable prices. Someone agreed and, as chance would have it, that someone was the very person who managed the pair of them last season. Everton now have more than a hint of Wigan about them. Let’s hope it was the good bit.
The Toffees may benefit from something of a managerial portmanteau this season. On the one hand, they should still have the defensive resilience drilled into them from years of management under David Moyes. Now coupled to this, the incoming Roberto Martinez will seek to overlay the attractive passing style that has become his trademark. It will be interesting to see if these two schools of football connect or collide.
A lot of anticipation this summer surrounded the premier league’s increased purchasing power (due to the improved TV deal) and how it would manifest itself. This was to be the transfer window where the premier league flexed its muscle and gave the other European Leagues a good look at their big shiny cheque books. In the end, the dominance at the cashier’s desk was most keenly observed not at the high table of the premier league elite, but at the clubs at the lower end of the division. Southampton, Sunderland and Norwich all signed key players from larger teams abroad. Pablo Osvaldo (Italian international from Roma, £14.6million), Emanuele Giaccherini (Italian international from Juventus, £6.5m) and Ricky van Wolfswinkel (Holland international from Sporting Lisbon, £10 million) each gladly dug out their passports and left bigger fish for the lure of the pound and the premiership. A seismic shift, if perhaps not the glamorous one some fans expected to see. Great news, though, for England when the inaugural Platini Plate gets off the ground.
It remains to be a farce that the transfer window does not close until after the season starts. Clubs cannot be expected to begin a campaign while an all-out fire sale is being conducted on their most valuable assets. The window should shut before the first ball is kicked and avoid this unseemly game of musical chairs three games into the season. In any case, shut it now most certainly has. Time to take the plastic off the new purchases and see if they were worth the outlay. Game on.
—————————————————————————————————————
Clubs ready themselves for the final twenty four hours of the transfer window.
[1] FIFA made the transfer window compulsory in European leagues at the start of the 2002–03 season (as a result of negotiations with the European Commission).
[2] My own view is that Navas will prove to be a great signing and the other big three (Jovetic, Negredo and Fernandinho) will prove to be good-ish signings.
Too Good for the English Game 