THE summer 2022 transfer window has only been open for one week, but the rumour mill is already working overtime.

It often feels like the transfer window is more popular than the football itself. A phenomenon that has grown in the digital age from the wonders of the BBC’s daily gossip column, fuelled by fantasy football, and the Fifa and Football Manager video games which are about buying and selling as much as playing.

The introduction of transfer windows themselves has made this part of the game into something of an event in its own right. The countdown begins to win the transfer window before ignoring the football again for a few months in preparation for its reopening in January.

But most of the furore around the transfer window ignores the reality of what football clubs are (or should be) looking to build: the dressing room dynamics, homegrown player quotas, matchday squad limits, the players themselves, and maintaining a wage structure fair to all staff.

The best teams are good at squad management and recognising the value of existing playing staff. Buying and selling players isn’t as easy as it is in fantasy football or video games where there is no emotion, no personal relationship, and the only thing involved is the numbers.

One of the worst things for a manager or coach to have to do is leave good players out of their matchday squad.

The size of a Premier League squad is limited to 25 with a limit of 17 non-homegrown players, but any number of under-21s can be added.

Teams now get to name nine substitutes, which takes the matchday squad size to 20, but this still means some players from the squad of 25 or more have to be left out altogether.

This can affect morale, and managers have to perform a balancing act when it comes to making sure all players feel valued while also making sure they have the required depth to compete in an often gruelling schedule.

Football teams don’t just need good players. They need a balanced dressing room of personalities and characters who will buy into what they are trying to achieve on and off the pitch.

And when a team does sign good players, they need to make sure they are the right player for their style of play, and can envision where they will fit in the side.

Most of the players at the top level are pretty good, else they wouldn’t be there in the first place. Clubs just need to make sure they are getting the right ones.

They need to have recruitment processes in place which match the overall aims of the club and the style of play.

Last summer, for example, Chelsea spent close to £100m on Romelu Lukaku.

The Belgian had once again become one of the top strikers in Europe, setting Serie A alight, winning the title with Internazionale – and scoring 24 goals in the process. 

So the transfer to Chelsea, even with the huge fee, seemed to make sense and many were tipping him to finish top scorer in the Premier League.

But as we saw, a top striker at Inter doesn’t necessarily mean a top striker at Chelsea.

Their manager, Thomas Tuchel, couldn’t seem to find a place for the new signing in his system and didn’t want to adapt his system to suit his new signing. 

The German often opted for Kai Havertz in the central attacking role as he was better suited to the tactics he wanted to employ.

Lukaku was brought on as a sub 15 times last season and was an unused sub on five occasions. Not what you’d expect for a £100m signing.

This wasn’t Lukaku’s fault, and at the end of the season, the player himself could probably highlight the things that went wrong in this deal.

It was, apparently, an example of a club’s recruitment team and coaching staff not being on the same page.

Considering the huge sums of money spent on transfers and wages, a coherent recruitment and sporting strategy would be one of the things you’d think clubs strive to get right, but they so often get it wrong.

Everton are, unfortunately, the prime example of spending gone wrong. Recent research carried out by football finance blog Swiss Ramble put Everton in the Premier League’s top five for transfer spend across the past five years.

Manchester City were top, followed by Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Everton, with Liverpool sixth. 

Transfer fees don’t tell the full story, but even when taking into account total spend including wages, Everton still came out sixth.

Based on this, Everton should be a team at least challenging for the European places, but instead were fighting to stay in the league at the end of the 2021/22 season.

Arsenal and, especially, Man United could also do better in this area. There’s no way United shouldn’t be qualifying for the Champions League given their resources, but it goes to show that lots of money spent in the transfer market is no guarantee of success.

Another problem at United is that their owners seem happy to cruise along taking money out of the club having already burdened it with debt, not really caring about winning, as long as the revenue continues to flow.

Though even they might get a wake-up call with the club out of the Champions League, and missing out on the large amount of income that particular tournament brings.

United can’t really be accused of not spending, though. They have four players in the top 20 all-time transfer fees, with their £89m spent to bring Paul Pogba back to the club from Juventus making the top ten.

Clubs will break their existing structures to make that marquee signing. When it doesn’t work out they will try it again, breaking not only their structure but their team. Even good players and good managers can start to look bad as a result.

Incidentally, Liverpool and Man City only have one player each in the top 20 all-time top transfer fees spent.

As Liverpool and other clubs such as Brentford and Brighton (and arguably Man City in recent years, given their success) have shown, it’s not necessarily about how much you spend but how you spend it.

Meanwhile, some of those other multi-billion-pound businesses with billionaire owners are still startlingly bad at this key area of the modern game.

In many ways, football has found some of these owners out, and it makes you wonder how they managed to be “successful” in other industries...

The transfer window is fun and there’s a reason why the BBC’s football gossip page will be one of the most read on the internet each day, just as we used to check the equivalent on Ceefax or in the papers.

But it’s more than just about signing the best players, or those who might be highly rated on a Fifa or Football Manager game. It’s about squad building and team building, in a sporting sense rather than a corporate one.