Any long time viewers of the site will know my position regarding the transfer windows.
I hate the speculation because the vast majority of it is utter rubbish.
That said, I know some of you love it, so I’m happy to talk about it.
Me, I’ll just remain very sceptical until it has been confirmed that a player has signed.
A typical example of what I believe is utter tosh, is a link I’ve seen to Charlie Austin, the Southampton striker.
There was me thinking he was an attacking midfielder. Did he get pushed up front some time back?
Whatever, he’s 29 and apparently on £70k a week, with two years left to run on his contract.
A cursory glance at the Premier league table tells me Southampton finshed 16th in the season just gone, which is surely at least where we’d hope to finish this season.
So, if he’s deemed not good enough for Southampton, why on earth does anyone think we’d want him?. And on those wages, when it’s blatantly obvious that we have FFP issues, now that it seems we’re under a soft transfer embargo?
For info, this is where a club agrees not to do any deals, after a request from the EFL. This would explain why the Jota and Hause deals were delayed.
But it now seems that the embargo has been lifted, as the latest news is that we’ve taken up our option to sign Hause and the Jota deal has been confirmed by Dean Smith himself.
Which is interesting, because it means that if we were under an embargo, something has happened very, very recently to allow the EFL to lift it.
I wonder what?
Or is it just that we had other irons in the fire and wanted to hold fire?
Jesus, even I’m being sucked into the speculation game now.
Anyway, while the Jota deal makes sense because Smith knows him, the Austin deal just doesn’t, in any way. At all.
Simply put, if we sign 5% of the players we’ve been linked with, the media will have done very well and better than usual.
I can’t remember the actual reason why windows were introduced, but logic tells me it was to prevent clubs reinforcing when they suffered a particular weakness, which gave the bigger clubs another advantage.
But since when have the powers that be been bothered about that?
Or maybe it was to stop “tapping-up” and undermining rival clubs at important times?
Yes, that doesn’t happen any more, does it?
I dont know, part of me wishes we could go back to the old system, as I detest reading pure guesswork.
