After developing the Fab Four frontmen Jürgen Klopp has spent £75m on a defender – the first part of an answer to a glaring weaknessVirgil van Dijk appears delighted his long-projected move to Liverpool will go ahead and everyone else involved in the world-record £75m deal has a reason to be just as happy.Southampton may not have had any particular desire to lose the player but they have been well aware for at least half a season a move was on the cards and have played their role as a selling club to perfection. Liverpool’s offer of £60m last summer was already a lot of money but the Saints made a principled stand over what they considered an illegal approach,...
Ronald Koeman was applauded for his swift summer recruitment but his failure to replace Everton’s most important departing player shows the pitfalls of judging a team’s health by their transfer activityAn ancient cliche was conspicuous by its absence when Everton’s owner, Farhad Moshiri, gave Ronald Koeman a vote of confidence the other day. Older football followers in particular might have noted that in reporting it hardly anyone used the word “dreaded”.Presumably it is safe to say votes of confidence are still dreaded, because no manager particularly wants one and they still tend to mean what they always meant, that the stay of execution will be terminated anyway if results cannot be quickly improved. Related: Ronald Koeman given time to solve...
The bold decision to go it alone on the transfer window leaves English clubs at risk of losing big names while being unable to buy replacementsThe Premier League’s chairman, Richard Scudamore, pointed out that the issue over the transfer window closure has been a subject of fierce debate every year since it was introduced in 2002 in an attempt to regulate player and agent power. So it should come as no surprise that, after many hours of wrangling, an amendment was finally passed on Thursday and the window will now shut before the start of the season. Related: Premier League clubs vote to close transfer window before start of season Related: Transfer window a show in danger of overshadowing the...
£1.4bn spent is a record but the nature of biggest signings, such as Álvaro Morata and Alexandre Lacazette, tells you all you need to knowThe road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. In which case, as the Premier League unbuckles its belt and lets loose a great shivering belch of satisfaction at the excesses of the transfer window just past, we can presumably expect a state of contemplative calm to settle as the process of digestion begins.A total of £1.4bn spent, more than 200 player moves and countless disruptive hours in negotiation are surely enough to satisfy even the most voracious league in the world that enough is for now enough, although on the other hand perhaps not....
Virgil van Dijk, Philippe Coutinho and Alexis Sánchez are just three of the refuseniks who will have to buckle downA penny for someone’s thoughts seems a ludicrously old-fashioned saying in the era of the £1.4bn Premier League transfer window. But now the whole brouhaha is over it is hard not to wonder what is going on inside the heads of players whose hopes were dashed on deadline day. It is the football world’s equivalent of being stood up for a dream date. Wake up full of nervous expectancy, impossible to think about anything else all day, then the wretched waiting before the bleak realisation that nothing special is going to happen.So what now for Virgil van Dijk and Philippe Coutinho,...