By the time the clock hit 7.30pm the main presenter on Monday’s Sky Sports Window Slam Countdown looked not just frazzled, but oddly heroic, like a man who has ingested a potentially fatal overdose of late-breaking excitement and is now being encouraged to keep talking in a low, dogged voice about massive deals and unexpected snags just to keep himself awake until the paramedics arrive.
There was something of the Situation Room about the whole tableau, five nobly dishevelled talking heads leaning in around the curved tables, lists of names earnestly reeled off. Eberechi Eze. Randal Kolo Muani. We’re hearing that Coventry has fallen. In the bottom corner of the screen a picture of Marc Guéhi would flash up now and then reproachfully, Guéhi wearing a strange, lost smile as though he has in fact died. And below it all the countdown clock replaced with the simple end‑of‑days message: WINDOW CLOSED.
But the man behind the desk was also right. Name a more sensational window. Or at least a more all-encompassing window, a sustained emotional, strategic, plot-driven entertainment product, all wrapped up in a single epic three-month tracking shot. So much so that the fact we now have to play an actual football season feels like being told you’ve got to go for a walk on Christmas morning after opening all your presents by 8.30am, already crashing through the floor on chocolate orange segments.
We must recite the numbers now, because the Premier League’s numbers are, as ever, boom‑time numbers. A record £3.1bn spent! A record £1.4bn trading loss! The Premier League’s top five spent more, gross, on players than all the big five leagues combined. Reeling this off is like striding the floor of some wild early noughties boiler room trading room. Ring the bell. Unleash the cocaine leopards. Cue the champagne-spraying montage, the rueful voiceover about FBI investigations.
At this point it is also necessary to answer two key questions. First, who won the window? Because the window can and will be won. Goals, pots, balance sheets will tell us this. And second, what does it mean? Is it real? Is this rising balloon territory, all dangling guy ropes and ever-thinning air? Are we in fact heading for the fall? The second of these is easier to answer, because essentially it doesn’t matter. This is all real because the Premier League says it’s real. There has been a sense of collective hysteria around the window, fans, players, owners, the media losing their minds in concert. But this is also a design feature. The Premier League is an entertainment exchange, its income related directly to the level of reach, grab, eyeballs.
The excitement is in itself exciting, the conversation a self‑fuelling resource, the endless outraged inventory-taking of player-grabs and commercial wins oddly reminiscent of the online claustrophobia of Covid times. Kneel before my tinned tomato armoury. Behold how much toilet roll I now have.
Does hard value actually matter in this environment? The Premier League has once again triumphantly asset-stripped the Bundesliga. Bournemouth are paying bigger wages than most of Serie A. Ligue 1 made a £250m profit in this window, the Premier League a £1.4bn loss and this will always be seen as victory, even if it doesn’t in reality reflect an endless hoarding of superstar talent.
For all the money circulating through its books this summer the Premier League clubs signed only two players from last year’s Ballon d’Or top 25, Florian Wirtz and Viktor Gyökeres, and none from the top 10. Hugo Ekitiké, the third biggest transfer fee of the greatest transfer window in history, is a very good player. But he is yet to win a senior France cap. Alexander Isak, jewel of the window, a footballing Helen of Troy, is also, we are repeatedly told, the best centre‑forward in Europe. Is he, though? Europe doesn’t think so. Europe thinks this is Ousmane Dembélé, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Harry Kane or even Robert Lewandowski (37 years old, 44 goals last season).
Again, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the hard commercial activity. If there is hysteria here, that hysteria is a key tool in the Premier League’s self-fuelling supremacy. For the first time this summer there is sense the window has been properly weaponised as a part of the product, club rivalries, social media dominance, global interest channelled through its endless drama. Anecdotally, the Premier League transfer window has generated greater online reach than either the men’s Club World Cup or the women’s Euros, both of which are actual football competitions.
Everyone is dragged into this now, from the new superstar-owner dynamic and the dilution of managerial authority, down to broadcasters and journalists whose reputations now fall or rise on predictions over player sales, something that is particularly odd because often this isn’t really journalism at all; not triple-sourcing or the highlighting of inconvenient facts, but access in return for repeating what you’re told, a channel-for-hire in the negotiating process.
In the middle of all this daily subplots and narrative devices have flared up. Tantrum Transfers? Is this a thing now? Not really. We definitely have a lot more public access to tantrums. But hanging on to a player who wants to leave for a record fee seems more novel as behaviours go, something only a bottomlessly wealthy sovereign wealth fund would entertain to this degree.
Player power? Is this now the scourge of the game? The boundless arrogance of the modern superstar? Not really, either. Players have always moved, and asked to move, and been duly traded in for other men. Money doesn’t just talk loudest, it’s the only conversation in the end, as it always has been.
Which is all very well. But who won the window? The obvious answer is Liverpool, because they signed the most eye-catching players while balancing the books expertly, and also triumphed in the weird arm wrestle with Newcastle’s ownership. Will this translate into footballing success? Have they overstacked some parts of the team? A reassuringly human drama must now play out. Isak hasn’t kicked a ball for four months, and must do so under a bizarrely overheated wall of noise. It will at the very least be fascinating viewing. Again, the product wins.
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Elsewhere Arsenal have improved their squad in all the right areas, but must now cope with the pressure of having improved their squad in all the right areas. Tottenham have recruited well. Xavi Simons could be a great signing with a fair wind. Newcastle have a balanced team now, and a useful looking sense of shared rage. Fulham and Crystal Palace will be cast as window-losers. Both will probably be OK. Manchester United, who exist in their own self‑contained sphere of quirkiness, who are basically Phoebe in Friends now, have signed a 23-year-old goalkeeper, which is pretty close to an act of sporting sadism.
But in the end it is tempting to conclude the real winners of the greatest window are Chelsea, who haven’t just won the window but the entire summer. Chelsea made £90m from the Club World Cup. They sold more than £300m in unwanted footballers, a sign that having a wheeler-dealer in charge might actually be quite handy when you wheel as well as deal.
Mainly Chelsea won it because they have become the norm now, have turned everyone else into Chelsea, have turned out to have been operating ahead of the curve. It seems financial rules really are there to be disrupted. Win that new US-facing jolly. Sell a building. Sell the women’s team. Employ a manager who will gleefully wield the cleaver. Mainly Chelsea seem to have understood before everyone else one key structural driver behind the summer’s hyper‑commerce, the fact PSR rules are malleable, that the way to make them work for you is to just keep trading, keep shifting money around.
And in this respect football is once again telling us things. There is a fascinating parallel to be drawn between the luminous global financial success of the Premier League and the concurrent financial contraction, the social failure of the nation that houses it. Why has one of these things had a 20‑year boom, the other a 20‑year slump? Perhaps the best way to see the football bubble is as a version of the London housing market, which has been about to burst for 30 years now, but which won’t burst because it isn’t really about actual supply and demand or rational economic rules. It is instead a place to rest money, to invest and make profit. Its units, player sales or house sales, are really just a stake to enter the game, exchangeable for other vouchers, a self-funding set of casino chips.
Predictions of doom will always swirl. There are vast amounts of outstanding transfer fees in the works, some say more than £3bn in money on tick. What if someone goes bust? What about the domino effect? But money is too big now. It feels self-supporting at this level of income. The Premier League spent £1bn on its own players this window. What does it matter what price it puts on their heads? This is internal circulation, a global-scale sporting economy.
There is an echo here of what one of the Premier League’s US owners once said privately about buying major assets in a time of quantitative easing. That money has to go somewhere. Just keep moving it on and nobody actually loses. This may or may not turn out to be voodoo economics, pre‑crash talk while others race towards a cliff. But for now at least we are all Chelsea, all passengers inside that same self-inflating bubble.
