England admit failed transfer window experiment, realign with Europe

In a most ironic twist given the current political landscape, England are moving to realign with Europe once again when it comes to the summer transfer window.

Three years ago, a trailblazing Premier League voted 14-to-5 (1 abstaining) to move forward transfer deadline day to better align it with the actual start of the season, setting it for the Thursday before the first weekend of the season instead of the end of August. The idea behind the change was to avoid disrupting teams already several weeks into a new season with massive incoming and outgoing squad changes.

The League expected the rest of Europe to follow to avoid the awkward situation where English teams could no longer sign players but could still sell players to other leagues. Unfortunately, a grand total of ZERO leagues have followed since. (Addendum: which also makes sense, since the Premier League tends to start a week or two before all the other major European leagues; so why would they close their windows that early?)

So, after two shortened summer windows (a bare FIFA-mandated minimum of 12 weeks long) in 2018 and 2019, the Premier League will realign with most of the rest of Europe, and return to the status quo for 2020.

“At a Shareholders’ Meeting today, Premier League clubs voted to adopt a change to the Summer Transfer Window closing date for season 2020/21.

“This will move the closing date back to the traditional point at the end of August/early September. The 2020 closing date will therefore be 17:00 BST on September 1 (August 31, 2020 being a UK Bank Holiday).”

-Premier League statement; source: Sky

Of course, given how Chelsea only ever seem to do business on Transfer Deadline Day, all this means is that we have three extra weeks of monitorings and considerings and other assorted nonsense to deal with. Hurray?