The Triumph of Transfer Culture 📊

It’s been nearly three days as I write this, and yet I still feel a little bit like I have not come to terms with the transfer window. Those last couple of days were such a blizzard of rumors and whispers and dramatic threats to resign that I’m almost certain a couple of deals, deals probably worth tens of millions of dollars, passed me by. There’ll be at least one player, next week, wearing a jersey I don’t expect.

Taken as a whole, though, it felt like an unusually significant transfer window. Not because Liverpool broke the British transfer record – twice, sort of – or even because the Premier League seemed to go into a sort of drunken “Brewster’s Millions” frenzy in those final few hours. There is nothing new about England’s top flight spending money. England’s top flight loves spending money.

No, its importance lay in what it told us about where football stands in 2025. It demonstrated the Premier League is an increasingly self-sustaining ecosystem. It proved even the other major leagues of western Europe are just parts in a supply chain. And it offered us all a clear glimpse of the extent to which football is now split into two constituent parts: the game, and the industry, and which matters more.

It was just a tweak, really. Nothing more than an administrative fix, so cosmetic that many people may not even have noticed. This summer, the clubs of the Premier League decided to shave just a few hours off the transfer window. Rather than finishing at 11 p.m., U.K. time, as has traditionally been the case, deals would have to be done by 7 p.m.

The rationale was simple and, by the fairly brutal standards of English football, surprisingly humane. Transfers mean a lot of paperwork. They require club staff to remain at work until they are completed: not just the well-paid lawyers and executives, but photographers and communications officers and groundskeepers – people with normal jobs and normal lives. 

And, although it does not appear this way, transfer deadline day is an entirely artificial thing. It is not tidal. It is not related to the solstice, or the harvest, or the position of the stars. It is not written down in some holy book that it has to last until 11 p.m. All of those people do not have to be at work. So the Premier League decided, sensibly, to change it. They might almost be said to have acted out of kindness.

It was just a happy coincidence that, in doing so, they created a piece of pitch-perfect television drama, the sort of water cooler, social media-friendly content that broadcast executives crave, all of it played out in the heart of prime time.

Looking back, given how embedded both the transfer window and transfer deadline day have become in football culture, it is strange to think that they were not especially popular when they were first introduced to England in the summer of 2002. They had existed elsewhere before that, and worked perfectly well. Sadly, from a British perspective, that made them irredeemably foreign, and therefore bad.

That resistance did not last long. Not because of the sporting benefits – previously, teams had been able to trade until the end of March, meaning that clubs were always at risk of having a star player plucked from them – but because it made for great television.

Sky Sports News had launched in 1998, Britain’s first 24-hour sports news channel, but initially it struggled to find both an identity and a purpose. In 2002, Sky attempted to breathe fresh life into its operation, giving the studio a makeover and, crucially, moving it outside of the company’s paywall. In October of that year, the channel went free-to-air, effectively serving as an outreach program to potential subscribers.

Some of its output, of course, focused on actual sport, but it did not take long before executives worked out that nothing drew viewers in quite like transfers, particularly in the long, slow months of the summer, when there were no games to cover. Within five years, transfer deadline day loomed sufficiently large in the public imagination that Sky Sports News’ coverage had its own iconography: presenters in yellow ties and yellow dresses that matched the network’s bright yellow breaking news chyron.

It would not be true to say that football’s obsession with transfers was constructed by Sky. Stories about potential player trades had been a fixture of newspapers across Europe as far back as the 1920s. But the medium, as the media theorist Marshall McLuhan put it, is the message. Sky’s breathless coverage of transfers took what was once a sideshow and made it a centrepiece of the culture.

That effect has only been compounded, over the last decade and a half, as coverage of transfers has moved away from the television studio and onto social media. Nothing drives traffic quite like a transfer story. Nothing consumes fans like the possibility that their club is about to sign, or about to sell, someone. The fixation is so great that there is a very real chance that Fabrizio Romano may well be the most famous journalist in the world.

Just as transfers suited television perfectly, they are ideally designed for the attention economy of social media. They are quick hits, bite-size morsels of information, easily both to consume and to share. I’ve written a lot elsewhere about the fact that whether a transfer story is true or not is almost immaterial to its appeal; the fantasy is part of the fun. Unlike the real football season, they are not a slow burn; their meaning is not really contingent on what happens next week. Completing a major deal is, in effect, to see a club establishing its clout. For fans, it is an instant dopamine rush, an easy and conclusive win.

This is not without consequences. We can often be blind to the ways in which the game’s broader ecosystem influences the way we see football itself. There is a pretty clear connection between the popularity of video games and fantasy sports over the last 30 years and football’s growing willingness to embrace the idea of data; there is, it strikes me, a link between the rise of data and an increasing tendency to judge players exclusively by their output.

The obsession with transfers, too, has had an effect, one perhaps most eloquently captured by Mohamed Salah this week. When a Liverpool fan account posted pictures of Luis Díaz and Darwin Nuñez, contrasting them with Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak and suggesting this represented an upgrade, Salah suggested that it might be better to “celebrate the great new signings” without “disrespecting the Premier League champions.” 

What Salah was highlighting, in effect, was how disposable some seem to consider footballers, how easily their efforts and their abilities are dismissed, how eagerly people are awaiting the next player, the next deal. The lasting bond between fans and players seems to have been eroded. Clubs, at times, see players as nothing but tradable assets. Fans have been conditioned to think the same way.

And yet, as enticing as it is to scorn this approach, it is not hard to understand. Modern football has been turned into a bottomless well of content; it has been sold across the world not just as a sporting loyalty but as a lifestyle choice. Fandom is something people are encouraged to perform almost permanently. 

The feverish coverage of transfers, particularly during the summer, is a construct of the football industry. It is designed to keep fans hooked in, to retain eyeballs, to maintain the torrent of clicks and hits and impressions; it has helped to make football the cultural phenomenon it has become. The spending of money drives the earning of money.

But it is also a way that everyone can feel part of the game, or at least what we may as well call the football industrial complex. You do not need to buy a ticket to keep track of transfers. You do not need to have several dozen expensive television connections. You do not need to wake up in the early hours of the morning and hope that your semi-legal fire stick is working.

Transfers are a part of football that are open to anyone with a phone, regardless of age or location or income. It is a rolling drama, in the summer, that lives in your pocket, and updates in real time. When so much of the actual game itself is sporadic, hived off, available only to those able to afford it, it should not really be a surprise that it feels like the trading is the main event. It is, after all, the part that we can all see.

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It’s not that long since one of the great staples of the Premier League’s groaning discourse featured a British manager of a certain age complaining, effectively, that there were too many foreigners coming over here, taking his jobs. 

It was a point of view best captured, like so many incorrect points of view, by Sam Allardyce. The abiding villain of the Premier League era once complained that he would be considered for much more glamorous jobs if his name was a little more exotic. There are plenty of British managers who would have agreed with his sentiment, even if they might have been too sensible to express it in public.

This was, though, always a misunderstanding. The reason the Premier League’s traditional elite tended to look to the major clubs of the continent for managers was not snobbery; it was because they had identified that running Bayern Munich or Paris St.-Germain had much more in common with guiding one of England’s supertankers than time in charge of one of the division’s lesser lights. The scale, the demands, the pressure: Borussia Dortmund is a far better proving ground than Bolton, or even Brighton.

Something similar, I think, might be happening with players. It has been true for some time that global football is constructed, now, effectively to funnel talent into the Premier League. Or, looked at another way, the Premier League’s wealth serves to support domestic football all over the world: England’s clubs buy from France, Spain and Germany; their teams refresh their rosters from Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Argentina and Brazil; sides in those countries, in turn, scour Eastern Europe or Scandinavia or Colombia for replacements, and so it goes, an endless churn.

That remains true: English clubs, this summer, paid German ones somewhere in the region of $700 million for players. The teams of the Bundesliga only spent $800 million or so. English money basically underwrote their transfer window. (It is telling that La Liga spent only $500 million; the difference may well be that England no longer looks to Spain for players as much as it once did, reducing Spanish clubs’ capacity to buy.)

But Germany was not England’s biggest market; the teams of the Premier League did not feel the need to travel even that relatively modest distance. Over the last two months, English football has looked increasingly inward; a third of the $4 billion the Premier League spent went to other Premier League sides. Manchester United bought from Wolves and Brentford; Newcastle plucked recruits from Aston Villa, Brentford and Nottingham Forest; Liverpool signed someone from Newcastle.

The message, it seems, is that the most valuable quality a player can have – the most reliable gauge of their likely success, if not the only one – is that they have already played in the Premier League. It is, I think, an indication that English football is becoming increasingly unmoored from Europe, particularly among the elite.

There have still, obviously, been high-profile new signings: Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike, Martin Zubimendi. The Premier League has picked the flower of the crop from Europe, as it always does. But in most cases, it looks out at the continent and, with every passing year, sees a world with which it has less and less in common. The only relevant proving ground, in all but exceptional cases, is itself.

Rog and Rory break down the intense battle between title hopefuls Liverpool and Arsenal, wonder how Arne Slot will play Isak alongside all of Liverpool's new signings, and discuss how football chants are created. Plus, are Everton winning the league?! Watch on YouTube or listen here.

It’s great to establish, early on, that the readers of this newsletter are a helpful bunch. I asked last week for theories as to why the transfer window might remain open beyond the start of the season, and thankfully many of you were happy to oblige.

“I believe it’s a sensible policy for a few discreet reasons, all of which could generally be described as insurance,” wrote Daniel Huey. “If a team has a key injury, it’s a grace period to replace them. The lag time gives the global market time to sort itself out. Most teams, particularly those with new managers and many signings don’t have very much worked out by the first match, so the extended window allows them to rectify issues that become apparent after the opening games.”

These are all sufficiently convincing arguments that, by the end of Daniel’s email, I was almost willing to reconsider my long-held position that the window should shut before the first game. (This wouldn’t mean less time for the market to arrange itself, it would just mean it all happens a lot faster.)

But then Ben Nathan reminded me that perhaps the motives are not that pure. “Surely it’s just greed and FOMO on account of the Premier League teams,” he wrote. This is undeniably true: a couple of years ago, they did decide to close the window before the season started, only to reverse when they realized Europe’s other major leagues wouldn’t follow suit. They all want as much time as possible to spend.

Zach Kelly, too, offered a somewhat conspiratorial explanation. “Perhaps the clubs use last-minute moves to take off some of the early season pressure,” he suggested. “When the noise gets too loud in the first couple of matchweeks, a last-minute transfer quiets everything a bit.” This is, I think, a slightly more cynical interpretation of one of Daniel’s ideas. I like it.

And finally, Alan Hughes has a question. “Once Isak is signed, perhaps you could discuss the tactics used by Liverpool to sign top players like him and Virgil Van Dijk, and whether this constitutes ‘tapping up’?”

To any readers unfamiliar with the phrase, ‘tapping up’ constitutes a (buying) club agreeing a deal with a player before they have established an agreement with a (selling) team. It has, I’ll admit, always struck me as a particularly arcane sort of sin, a legacy of the days when players could be retained by their clubs even when their contracts had expired.

It makes perfect sense to work out if someone wants to play for you – and how much they might expect to be paid – before you start negotiating with their employer. It makes such sense, in fact, that everyone does it. When you see that ‘personal terms’ will not be an obstacle to a transfer, it is because they have already been agreed.

Tapping up, now, reminds me of a line from Emily Nussbaum’s brilliant book “Cue The Sun!”, and is (I think) attributed to James Poniewozik, the New York Times’ TV critic. “Reality TV is non-fiction television of which I personally disapprove,” he wrote. Tapping up is something everyone does. But it is only wrong when it is done to you.

That’s all for this week. Thanks so much for reading, and do keep your questions and ideas and comments coming in to [email protected]. They’re all much appreciated! Enjoy the international break, if such a thing is possible, and I’ll see you next week.

All the best,
Rory

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