Transfer market: bring forward the next winter transfer market to December

Here we go again. The championship restarts and we still do not know how the participating teams will be composed. All predictions are accompanied by an asterisk: * except for excellent purchases or sales between now and the end of the transfer market. Never as this year the starting grids sketched on the eve are largely unreliable: this time, with the early departure due to Qatar, there are four championship days scheduled before the end of the negotiations. How can the coaches prepare well for the season without yet knowing what the full staff will be at the end of the month and having had most of the new arrivals available only in the last few days, if not in the last hours?

Why not anticipate?

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The same situation will recur after the long stop for the World Cup: Serie A will resume in January, coinciding with the reopening of the market. Unless a hypothesis is taken into consideration that has not yet been advanced by anyone. After all, it’s a bit like Columbus’s egg. Given that the main European leagues will have to stop on November 14 and that everyone is expected to resume between the end of December and the beginning of January, why not bring forward the winter market session by a month? An even longer period of buying and selling campaigns could be allowed starting around November 20th and closing at Christmas, as the Premier League will be the first to restart on classic Boxing Day on December 26th. attention of the Italian fans in the long period of time in which the only football emotions would otherwise be offered only by a world championship without Italy, therefore of limited value for us.

Abnormal season

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The possibility of leaving the transfer window open, at least the summer one, has been discussed for a lifetime only during the rest period of the championships, especially at the request of the coaches, but in reality without finding solutions. In 2018 the closure of the August session was tested before the restart of the tournaments, but the idea was joined only by the Premier League (stop on August 9) and Serie A (stop on August 17), the other European countries kept the traditional date of 31 August, thus causing unacceptable international imbalances. The following year, Italy immediately backtracked, while England kept the point alone: ​​then, due to the pandemic, in 2020 all the calendars were upset and with the return of normalcy we returned to past bad habits. The Football Association has already established the dates for the next winter transfer market session: they are the usual ones, from 2 to 31 January 2023. A decision taken in this way, without thinking about the profound anomalies of the season that is about to begin. But the time to change your mind and move forward by a month is all there. There would also be time for an international initiative with the aim of convincing the other main European Federations to do the same. An initiative that could be supported by the coaches, the most interested parties, perhaps through their official associations, assuming that they still have sense and bargaining strength, in an era in which even the technicians now rely almost exclusively on prosecutors. The market opened in December, in a month without a championship, would be a really nice Christmas present for Italian fans, an original way to chase away the melancholy of a missed World Cup.