The winter transfer window is designed for desperados. In most leading leagues, it falls in mid-season, as a device by which clubs can try to correct wretched planning the previous summer, or cover for a surprise rash of injuries, or shoo away unwanted or unhappy employees.
If a club’s poor planning has been really dire, and long enough lines of credit can be tapped, it is the well from which to construct a new strategy entirely, though it would usually be built haphazardly around a handful of players swiftly rummaged together.
January signings typically come with fewer guarantees than targets who have been stalked, scouted and thoroughly analysed ahead of a summer bid. It is always advisable, in the New Year, to read the small print.
Even the grandest clubs have been known to overlook it, as they hurriedly act in a window that is shorter than the June-to-September trading period.
Witness Real Madrid, who, in a panic about their failure to maintain the standards that yielded consecutive Spanish league titles in 2007 and 2008, splashed out more than €40 million (Dh202 million) on reinforcements in early 2009.
They went for a savvy, combative central midfielder, the France international Lassana Diarra, and an expert finisher, Holland’s Klaas-Jan Huntelaar. They hoped this pair would not only stabilise a wobbly domestic campaign, but help lift a four-year-long problem the club had in progressing beyond the last-16 stage in the Uefa Champions League.
The signings had some calibre. But Madrid’s administrative research was flawed.
Because of Uefa rules of the time, Madrid learnt after the deals were made that they were permitted to register one player who had played in the Uefa Cup that season – and not both of them, for European games for the remainder of the campaign. By March, they had crashed out of the Champions League in the knock-out round yet again.
The riskiest mid-season newcomer is the one who disrupts routines.
At Newcastle United, fans still talk about the charge for the Premier League title in 1996/97 derailing after New Year and the difficulties of integrating the mercurial Colombian striker, Faustino Asprilla, into a team that held a 12-point lead in the table in January.
Asprilla was an individualist. A common opinion is that, though brilliant at times, he obliged the team to alter tactically, and they lost their earlier momentum as a result. Newcastle finished second, overhauled by Manchester United.
Without exposure to pre-season practice, where a squad’s playing styles are established, principles set and fitness regimens applied, a January arrival has to play catch-up quickly. He must insert himself aggressively into the team’s habitual manoeuvres, and at the same time, take care not to come across as too starry to colleagues with whom an intense professional relationship must be nurtured.
Might Fernando Torres, who was transferred to Chelsea from Liverpool for a soaring £50 million (Dh303 million) in January 2011, have found the initiation smoother had he moved to London in a June or July, at the outset of a project, rather than being parachuted in with the pressure to score goals in abundance, as he had in his first seasons at Anfield?
Two years on from that startlingly costly transfer, Torres remains an inconsistent centre-forward, in and out of Chelsea’s first XI. And it is hardly encouraging for him that his employers are so openly pursuing reinforcements for his position, urgently, and once again in a January window.
sports@thenational.ae
