January transfer window under threat as old world order look to redress the balance after PSG spree

When he said the January transfer window should be scrapped this week, Arsene Wenger might have let the cat out the bag – or at the least the Arsenal manager will know from his impeccable connections in English football, Uefa and beyond, that this is more than a just a fanciful notion.

Wenger was speaking before the Premier League voted in favour of closing the summer transfer window at 5pm on the Thursday before the new season starts next August, with Arsenal one of the majority of 14. There is also a wider mood that the rest of Europe’s top leagues will not only fall in behind the English in restricting the summer window, but they, along with the Premier League, will eventually also chop the madness of the January window.

Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, was at the Soccerex conference in Manchester last week complaining about just about everything that stood in the way of the old Spanish duopoly - that mostly being Paris Saint-Germain, funded by the Qatari state who once made Barcelona a shirt-sponsorship offer they could not refuse. For Real Madrid and Barcelona, the closing down of the January window and the restrictions imposed on the summer window have a different purpose, but one many others share.

There is a belief among some of Europe’s biggest clubs that something must change after this summer, in which PSG have blown the competition out the water with their signing of Neymar and the curious arrangement with Monaco over Kylian Mbappe. They want to fall in behind the Premier League’s early closing of the summer window and the full closing of January as part of a number of measures likely to come into force too as the old money strikes back.

On top of that, it is expected that there will be a renewed effort to force Uefa to enforce Financial Fair Play, the premise that clubs can lose a maximum of €30 million over three years, when PSG’s summer of 2017 is scrutinised for licensing for next season’s Uefa competitions - but that will not be all.

European clubs, in particular those in Spain, are also expected to abolish the practice of rescission, or buy-back, clauses in players’ contracts – the very loophole that enabled PSG to buy Neymar for £198 million out from underneath the shield of Barcelona’s once impregnable financial might. The old order believes that Uefa and its president Alexander Ceferin will find it impossible to ignore the combined voice of so many famous old clubs.

PSG's capture of Neymar has caused a rethink Credit: AP

They have already persuaded Uefa to rewrite its coefficient laws which will come into effect from last season, guaranteeing Italy four places in the Champions League instead of three and factoring in past success, however historic. The new seeding system also decides who takes a greater share of the pot of television money and militates against teams who have come on the scene more recently in top-level European football, especially PSG and Manchester City but also others such as Villarreal and Athletic Bilbao.

Despite those measures, this summer of spending from PSG, and to a lesser extent City, has given the elite a vision of the future – and they do not like what they see, their view epitomised by Tebas’ relentless attacks on PSG over Neymar. Curtailing the transfer window in the summer will not make it impossible for PSG to pull off another major transfer coup but it is one small sign of just how eager certain clubs are to make it as difficult as possible for them.

For well-run Premier League clubs, who trust their own capacity to organise and execute a transfer strategy in the new shorter timeframe, even next summer with the disruption of a World Cup finals that runs to July 15, the early closing of the window made sense. There was also consideration given to the integrity of the competition and what might be described as the Oxlade-Chamberlain Question, that unfortunate turn of events when an individual plays against a club he is about to join.

If it is unacceptable for the competition to begin while player trading is continuing in the summer, then it is natural that the same measures must be in place while the league is in progress during January. In that regard there has been thought given among the 20 shareholders of the Premier League to the credibility of their competition and how it might be perceived in the eyes of the clear-thinking supporter.

The hope is that the new rules of the summer window, and the potential abolition of the January window, will encourage sensible, well-planned transfer strategies and not knee-jerk reactions. There is a fear among some clubs, improbable though it sounds, that they could consistently lose their best talent mid-season to others who could afford to buy anyone they wanted. One such example that has done the rounds was the debut of Reece Oxford, then 16, in West Ham’s opening day win over Arsenal on Aug 9, 2015 when his impact was such that bigger clubs who barely knew of the teenager before then gave serious consideration to signing him before the end of the month.

Why did Manchester United and Manchester City vote against it? The consensus was that both have the wealth to do whatever is necessary in the closing days of a bad window to make up the ground and wanted to give themselves the get-out if they need to. But elsewhere in Europe, powerful old clubs see the narrowing of the summer window, and the closing of January, as a part of a wider strategy of shutting out a new threat from the sovereign wealth funds – and rather less to do with the integrity of the game.

Carvalho row puts Sullivan under the spotlight

Sporting Lisbon are taking absolutely no prisoners when it comes to their rebuttal of West Ham chairman David Sullivan’s claim that the Portuguese had made a late offer to sell William Carvalho and then the subsequent emails that the English club say supports their case.

What must have seemed a good way of taking the pressure off after a dreadful start to the season, and an underwhelming transfer window, has caused Sullivan more problems than he could have imagined.

Funnily enough, the West Ham chairman has a bit of previous in this respect, claiming in a fans’ podcast in 2015 that Charlie Austin had “no ligaments in his knee”, a ludicrous notion rightly panned by the player which was supposedly why the club did not sign him in the summer of that year.

If memory serves correct, Austin scored for Southampton against West Ham in September last year and then again last month, the winner from the penalty spot.