Are The Big Clubs Broke ?

Bar­ring a flood of deals in the last cou­ple of days, this will go down as one of the qui­etest trans­fer win­dows in recent years. So far there have been very few actual sales with the major­ity of deals being short-term loan stints with options to buy later. The biggest deals I’ve seen announced have been in the £3m range, which is far cry from last Jan­u­ary. The Pre­mier League clubs alone spent over £175m last January.

By far, there has been more writ­ten and said about the state of clubs finances. Typ­i­cal big spenders like Man­ches­ter United and Liv­er­pool are fac­ing some harsh debt loads and despite the spin com­ing from both clubs, it appears they have no real trans­fer bud­get to work with. I can under­stand clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona not spend­ing big. Real already spent mas­sively in the sum­mer and they need to trim down their squad not add to it. Barcelona are cruis­ing along nicely and are con­cerned about dis­rupt­ing chem­istry. But where are Juven­tus, AC Milan, Bay­ern Munich, Lyon and some of the other peren­nial Cham­pi­ons League con­tenders? Even Chelsea, whose owner ‘wrote off’ their debt have not made any moves despite fac­ing a trans­fer ban this sum­mer and next Jan­u­ary as well.

It’s been very quiet with only the rumour mills work­ing over­time. Are the big club’s finances worse than they are let­ting on ? I’ve been read­ing David Conn’s columns on the finan­cial sit­u­a­tion that Man­ches­ter United are fac­ing. I rec­om­mend read­ing his piece on the gloom fac­ing the entire Pre­mier League, it is quite sober­ing. There are many other thought-provoking arti­cles such as this one from Simon Wil­son in Mon­ey­Week. With UEFA’s Finan­cial Fair Play ini­tia­tive on the hori­zon, it is pos­si­ble that clubs are try­ing to cur­tail their spend­ing so that they are not excluded from the lucra­tive Cham­pi­ons League competition.

What are your thoughts on the lack of trans­fer deals?