Profit and sustainability rules are just the beginning as Premier League dies a competitive death at the altar of transfers
The Premier League season is under two weeks away. The FA Cup started over the weekend, as did League One and League Two in the EFL. Various non-league divisions further down started in July.
I’m not one of those football supporters who feels the need for a break in the summer. June and July are months to survive, even when there’s a summer tournament to tide me over.
One way or another I love this wretched sport. I need to be at matches – Deep Heat, Bovril, freshly cut grass, all that. I need to spend my days waiting for games to start on TV that actually mean something.
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Without that meaning, that jeopardy, football is pointless. While there’s certainly an upsurge in importance when thehinterland of the summer gives way to the buzz of the early season, supporters of certainPremier League clubs might share my sense that 2025/26 is beginning under a shadow.
It should be no surprise to anyone that the shadow is cast by the transfer window, this heinous internal marketplace of bullshit and bluster that underpins almost every footballing evil and now operates as a game in its own right.
There are people more interested in clubs collecting players like trading cards than they are in football. May they be damned to their desires and condemned to exist in June and July for all eternity. I’m sure generative AI can come up with something they’ll enjoy.
For the rest of us, the return of football is sweet relief or the culmination of all that summer transfer activity or somewhere in between.
The point of all this – the obsession, the addiction, the visceralneed – is football with meaning.
That’s something that’s been ignored or forgotten by the game’s idea men and decision-makers for generations. It’s the silver bullet that kills off the European Super League and it’s the real reason people dislike abnormal investment.
It doesn’t feel like sport. It doesn’t take a Corinthian ideologue to sense on some level that the erosion of true competition in the name of business is damaging. The transfer market is that feeling distilled and drip-drip-dripped into football.
Newcastle United missing out on transfer targets
There are a few Premier League clubs spending like it's going out of fashion. Liverpool have made what should be big improvements to a title-winning squad. Manchester City set their stall out early with a clump of savvy buys. Chelsea, boosted by Club World Cup prize money, have taken off the handbrake.
Even Manchester United, with nothing but money and former glories to promise, brought in two of the division's most effective attacking players in an attempt to rectify whatever the hell last season was.
It's all within the laughable rules imposed by the Premier League but when a Champions League club like Newcastle United endures a transfer window like this one at the same time, it's easy to wonder about the point of it all.
Whether it's getting gazumped for Hugo Ekitike, failing in their attempts to sign João Pedro or having James Trafford swiped out from under their noses, the Magpies have laboured through a trying transfer window thus far. Anthony Elanga will take the edge off.
Now, their top scorer is throwing his weight around trying to get a move. In a World Cup year. From a Champions League club. With less than a month left before the end of the transfer window.
Alexander Isak is free to be motivated any which way he wants but this is not an attribute of a healthy and competitive sport.
Aston Villa limited by PSR artifice
Regular readers will know that I'm not a disinterested party here, though I like to think I care about the state of the game as well as my own club. It's been a tiresome summer forAston Villa supporters for various reasons.
For some, a lack of incoming transfer business is frustrating in its own right. For others, the club's inability to strengthen the squad while competing teams go hell for leather is infuriating.
For me, the fact that what's holding the club back is a set of rules outlined in the name of sustainability is ridiculous.
It's possible to accept the need for financial controls and incentives for revenue growth and still understand that selling a women's team, losing key talents and player trading in a hurry are anything but sustainable.
Villa need to increase their income first and foremost but strangling them on the pitch is the best way to prevent that happening. I'm not an advocate for free spending in football – if anything, I would take a much more extreme view in the name of competitive parity – but this isn't the answer.
Player priorities and the bigger picture
The entire construct of the transfer window, now fully industrialised complete with satellite economies that help pay a mortgage not a million miles from here, is barely the stuff of football at all.
Transfer reporting and insight is one thing. I don't care about it. Fine. But some journalists and a legion of mouth-breathing, bottom-feeding social media begs spend the summer trying to talk transfers into existence as if the other clubs have no agency in the matter.
That some fanatics feel entitled to arrogance by association and the right to look down at others because of whichever unfortunate football club they chose to clamp themselves to is a rant for another day.
Increasingly, it seems as if they’re right. The other clubsdo have no agency.
No matter the years left on a contract, the European football on offer and the supposed connection any given player has with a club, the regulatory framework exacerbates a pecking order that seems more crystallised than ever despite every club in the Premier League being absolutely minted.
For reasons I don’t think I’ll ever get close to understanding, players always want to take that step ‘up’ from a club. They almost never see the value in staying and it’s not always about money or trophies.
My guess is most players and perhaps many supporters of playing age have internalised that theoretical ranking and it’s starting to play out in the decisions of 25-year-old superstar players who don’t realise they have it all. They can’t conceive of a world in which intangibles can outweigh a pay increase. The game may never be truly competitive again.
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