Why are so few players changing clubs this summer?

• Football’s darker side. How the offenders can attack the complainant
• Transfers 25 August: 73 players coming to Arsenal, 30 players leaving

By Tony Attwood

Let’s pretend, for a second, that you really don’t have much time for transfer gossip.  They are always out there, and as we prove each year, no more than three percent ever happen. 

So you return to football in August expecting a few changes but now discover there are far fewer new faces than normal.  What’s going on? 

What you might not have been aware of is that the number of rumours is also way down on normal – which is odd since quite clearly most of them are simply made up.   (If you have any doubt of this have a look at the source of the rumours – most of them are one blog quoting another as the source with a few newspaper quotes thrown in for good measure).  

But this summer, even if you expected few of the rumours to have any sense of truth in them at all, you would be surprised at just how low the number of rumours and actual transfers there are.  We are into the season – but we only have 73 players rumoured to be coming to Arsenal.   Normally by this time we might have around 120.  If not more.

So what is going on?  Are the fantasy writers asleep?  Are you not paying attention?  Has the Premier League run out of money?

Clearly that last one is not true, but what is true is that having seen four clubs challenged over their transfer spending, clubs are now trying to reduce their spending on players in relation to their income.  What’s more, Manchester City, having spent fortunes in the past, now have a brilliant squad and a very handy junior set-up, plus all those members of the City group of clubs who will obligingly sell players to Man C at discount prices upon request.  

Across the 17 clubs left from last season, only 14 new signings started at the weekend. Six clubs started with an entire side that were at the club in 2023-24.  And that in the richest league in the world 

As a result of not buying so many players, the clubs are not selling so many players (largely because the rest of Europe finds it hard to pay Premier League prices, and everyone is trying to balance their books.)

Interestingly however Arsenal are coming out of this quite well, for the simple reason that when we look at the age of the players, we find they have the sixth youngest squad in the league.   And that is only because all the five clubs that claim younger squads (Chelsea, Tottenham, Bournemouth, Aston Villa, Southampton) have included loads of youngsters with no first-team experience, in their first team.

Chelsea have 39 players in their 25-man squad, Tottenham 28, Bournemouth 29, Southampton 32, Villa 28.  Arsenal however have 23 players in their squad – the smallest squad in the league, and obviously with two places left for whomsoever they want to in the coming week.

But this is what none of the other clubs have: space in the squad, so players won’t come until they are convinced that the club will give them a place.

In Arsenal’s case the second bonus comes from the fact that only two clubs had younger average ages of players on the pitch than Arsenal: Burnley who basically were playing a lot of youngsters as they didn’t have the money to spend and knew they were going down, and Chelsea whose managers were trying any trick in the book they could think of in order to avoid the sack.

What’s more in the case of Arsenal 16 first-team players are still there.  The big departures were Emile Smith Rowe who hardly played, and perhaps Aaron Ramsdale and Eddie Nketiah, neither of whom played much. 

And there is another factor.  Europe’s transfer market has largely been funded by Premier League clubs coming in and spending lots in order to try for instant success.  But now when the PL clubs want to get rid of a few big earners they can’t because the rest of Europe is not willing to pay what the PL wants or the salary the player has come to expect.  And with players not moving on, the new financial regulations won’t allow clubs to buy any more.

So Premier League clubs can’t move on their unwanted and failed players, and so can’t sign any more.  In the old days Chelsea could get around this by allowing unwanted players to rot in the reserves.  Who cared if the players on eight-year contracts were on top salaries and not playing – the owners had the money.

But now financial fair play and its successors mean clubs need to offload players.  But some players (not all but some) don’t want their salary cut in half to move to another country.  So they sit it out. 

Still, maybe Saudi Arabia will want to buy a few more – except PL players seem increasingly reluctant to go there – at least while still picking up a huge weekly pay cheque in a somewhat more democratic country with no state enforced religion.

And there is one more bit.  Most of the Premier League expect Manchester City to lose most of the 115 cases brought by the League against it, and either to lose the City legal case against the rest of the league, or win but then find the rest of the league resigns and forms a new league.  In short there is little doubt that the City Spending Machine will grind to a halt, and depress prices still further.