This was the grubbiest transfer window ever - and that's saying something

Paul Macdonald

• Updated: 2 Sept 2024 12:24 BST
• 5 min read

Another summer transfer window is over, more billions spent, more big paydays for agents and generally the direction of travel was more unedifying than ever.

FootballTransfers collaborated with the BBC, providing them with data around the fees paid and also projected value, using the Estimated Transfer Value (ETV) mechanism I built with the assistance of the good people at SciSports.

And it’s harder than ever to work this stuff out - not because the data isn’t good, but because clubs are operating from completely illogical positions and, in some cases, completely upending what anyone would consider to be decent, above-board behaviour.

READ MORE: Premier League summer transfers 2024: All the Done Deals

And it’s impossible not to start with the arch villains of the piece, Chelsea. It’s hard to know which of the many deplorable things they’ve done/tried this summer is the most egregious, but the stench coming from that football club could choke the game’s entire ecosystem.

In case it needs breaking down, just this summer Chelsea have:

• Sold young players for way above their market value to engineer positive numbers on balance sheet
• Conspired with other clubs to allow them to achieve similar to avoid PSR regulations
• Attempted to sell their own women’s team - to themselves, in the form of the parent company - in order to offset losses
• Had at one point 45 first-team players on contracts totalling 191 years
• Removed squad numbers from players to force them out of the club
• Attempted to sell players that they had only signed months before
• And finally, tried to sell a player who had only played 25 minutes for them for €21m to another club in their network

That’s just in the last three months. This is a case of such stupefying hubris, personified by Todd Boehly, an odiously arrogant man who thought he knew better than people who have been embedded in the workings of the sport for decades.

They thought they could moneyball this, and instead they’re just opting to bend the rules of acceptable discourse to such a degree as to make a mockery of the entire situation.

Of course, it’s not just Chelsea that are doing this. The machinations which took place to avoid PSR largely meant clubs selling youth talent to one another in order to bank 100% of the profit. This happened in the cases of:

• Omari Kellyman (Aston Villa to Chelsea, €22.5m, ETV €1m)
• Lewis Dobbin (Everton to Aston Villa, €11.5m, ETV €2m)
• Elliott Anderson (Newcastle to Nottingham Forest, €41.5m, ETV €8.5m)

Connected to these deals as well, as one club helps out another, meant Villa spent €44.5m on Ian Maatsen from Chelsea, again above market value, while Newcastle signed a fifth goalkeeper in Odysseas Vlachodimos (€23.4m) from Nottingham Forest, a player who isn’t even in matchday squads. This was clearly a ‘thank-you’ for the fee paid on Anderson which could be banked in the accounts.

But, if we assess literally every problem in the current transfer market, Chelsea highlight it. Stockpiling players. Selling off young talent. Ultra-long contracts for accounting purposes. Multi-club shenanigans. Zero concept of market value. Bad scouting. Worse acquisition. It’s all here, in all its forms.

READ MORE: Mudryk over the next Mbappe? Chelsea left regretting HUGE transfer blunder

Clubs not to blame

The problem lies at the fault of the custodians of the game for failing to recognise, long ago, that this would be a problem. The more that football clubs are treated like any company would, the more you need to be aware of quite what goes on in the corporate world to maintain the visage of profitability.

And football has just been too slow on the uptake, to understand which action leads to the next, and what must be done to stop it. You’re not dealing with local millionaires, who bought their club as a labour of love, any more.

You’re dealing with private equity, with investment groups, and mainly, in the case of the Premier League, with Americans, the world’s purveyors of capitalism. And if it’s not them, it is Middle Eastern states who have never had to comply with any regulations before and get annoyed when you ask them to.

Too much of the policy around transfers and finances is now reactive to what the clubs are trying to do, like fixing a leak in a dam that is set to burst. In a similar way to which doping doctors have been so patently ahead of testing, accountants are now paid handsomely to sniff out any way around what are, at times, paper-thin regulations.

Which culminates in a window like this. Seedy, depressing, uncivil. But this is the ultimate conclusion of allowing private equity money to dictate a market which hasn’t been properly changed or reformatted since Bosman 30 years ago.

The transfer market needs a complete overhaul. It needs independent regulation. And it needs to stop being at the behest of all the very worst people in the game.

Paul Macdonald was writing on his SubStack, GameWithinTheGame.