How Transfer Window Mania Began to Feel Like Nostalgia

Decay. Decay is all around us. It’s in the fume-filled air we breathe and waiting beneath the tyres of every speeding truck. The pollution sunsets look pretty but so do bruises on the neck of a strangulation victim. Did you know that when the birds sing in the morning, it’s because they’re terrified that their nests might be raided and their bloodlines stubbed out? There’s plastic in the ocean and your grandkids won’t eat fish. The machines are learning our weaknesses and we can’t figure out if Earth is flat. They’re listening to all your conversations whether you use your phone or not. Public will is being manipulated by the arrayed might of a monied elite who are sucking all the money out of the world in preparation for their escape to the next exoplanet. Frankie Knuckles is dead. Mark E Smith is, too. No one knows what to do. It’s all crashing down around our ears.

The day after Deadline Day always feels a little empty, doesn’t it? Even if the signings do turn out to be exciting ones, a done deal is, by definition, a dead deal. The mania that truly sustains the transfer window – that thirst for a glimpse of the promise of a better future lying in wait just a few new strikers along the path – is forced to cease, even if only momentarily, because so many possibilities and potential storylines are killed off on the stroke of 11PM. Suddenly, Philippe Coutinho signing for Manchester United isn’t a thing that can happen any more (it never was, but that’s not the point). The constant deluge of dopamine-teasing transfer gossip stalls to a drip. Moralists wince. Mauricio Pochettino sighs. David Gold’s phone stops ringing. All the schoolboys on Twitter pretending to be super-agents are forced back into hiding as the lies they’ve invented to antagonise 40-year-old Arsenal fans are revealed as nonsense before a watching world that will ridicule them mercilessly for a few days, before falling for the same con all over again in June.

And that’s fine. A con and a quick fix of bollocks is better than nothing.

This year, though, the 1st of February feels even more hollow than usual. Ever since that heady deadline day of summer 2008, when Manchester City were sold to an Arab oil state and broke the British transfer record for Robinho within the space of 24 hours, the shutting of every transfer window has grown in volume, turning at some point into an absurd and riotous carnival of slamming windows, the shutting of windows as an act of occult ceremony, a supernatural event to truly mark the passing of the seasons by. This January? Well, not so much. A cursory glance at the numbers is all that’s needed to confirm the impression of it as the dampest of squibs. If you exclude players who were bought and immediately sent out on loan, Premier League teams were only able to add 14 players on permanent deals. Loans, especially outgoing ones, were by a colossal margin what defined this window, the division’s 20 sides renting out 129 players between them, a figure that tots up to over six per club and practically begs you to laugh at it.

All of which speaks to a range of things. Firstly and most obviously, to the Premier League’s sheer acquisitive zeal, the lust for new blood, regardless of whether that blood turns out to be unicorn ichor or biker-caff black pudding.

Outside of Manchester City and the few clubs who never seem to spend any money at all, almost everyone quietly shuffled an expensive dud out of the service door this January, the list of their names resembling something you might find on a war memorial dedicated to an especially eclectic foreign brigade. Alexander Sørloth (Gent). Yannick Bolasie (Anderlecht). Tyrone Mings (Aston Villa). Álvaro Morata (Atlético Madrid). Baba Rahman (Reims). Michy Batshuayi (Crystal Palace). Georges-Kévin N’koudou (Monaco). This merry band of seven, signed for a combined total of around £160 million, all left on loan. Lazar Marković, signed by Liverpool for £20 million five years ago when that still felt like a lot of money, was one of those 14 Premier League players who moved permanently this month, on a free transfer to hapless, 19th-placed Fulham. TV-rich Premier League clubs have spent so long chucking money at quick fixes that the division has turned into a rotting stockpile of frustrated talent.

For all that football’s appeal resides in its inherent open-endedness, the fact that it essentially never stops, there’s something deeply unsatisfying about the non-committal faff of a loan deal. The masses aren’t going to turn out in force to a carnival staged to celebrate the arrival of Hävard Nordveit on a temporary six-month contract, though you get the sense that Fulham’s Aboubakar Kamara might rock up with a jerry can full of Buckfast, some Chinese bangers and a five-iron with a knitted Alexander Mitrović doll wrapped round the end if he hadn’t just been exiled to Yeni Malatyaspor for attacking a security guard and starting a fight during a yoga session. The prevalence of loans rained on a day that has worked its way through the echelons of English football to the point where it’s now a bigger spectacle that the League Cup Final, something everyone can enjoy and seethe over together as the poundometer piles up, the Sky Sports crews are accosted with sex toys and the Harry Redknapp memes do their weary rounds on Twitter.

But for now those purple dildo days are over. This January was the first time that all the familiar tropes and noise began to feel like nostalgia. It was a window of quiet efficiency and sound financial decision-making, a new narrative absorbed by fans who spent more time explaining FFP rules and the concept of contractual amortisation to each other than fantasising over wanton largesse and impossible signings. It was a window that felt like an out-of-season British pleasure beach town, tasted of cheap office coffee, smelt of pens and sounded like the verses of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer”, all sober, frigid air and deserted streets, the sense of grey Mondays and something left behind.

@hydallcodeen