Transfer deadline day in soccer is a lot of things. It's an impetus for fans across the world to become intimately acquainted with the flight patterns between Frankfurt and Milan and Newcastle.
If you're not huddled around your computer, refreshing FlightAware.com, you can take part in what some consider to be modern society's ritual welcoming of autumn: hoarding around whatever TV reporter is posted up at your favorite team's training ground, screaming into the camera, and maybe even waving some item that should've never left your bedroom.
It's also an advertisement for the absurdity of the way teams are run and players are acquired. David De Gea didn't move to Real Madrid because someone, somewhere, didn't know how to use a fax machine. Ryan Babel was in a helicopter that had to turn around, midflight, because a proposed move fell through. Peter Odemwingie literally drove to the QPR training ground to try to force a move to QPR to happen. A move to QPR did not happen.
A high-level decision-maker at a Premier League club once told me a story about how his team had to rush through a medical with someone other than their team doctor to complete a move in time on deadline day. I proposed to him that, well, this might not be the optimal way to do business. He responded by saying, well, that's just kind of how it goes.
In my mind, teams that know what they're doing are not scrambling to acquire players with only hours left to go and multiple games already in the books. Deadline day dealings are the result of poor planning and long-term mismanagement. It's the place for savvy teams to take advantage of desperate ones, a time for the smart clubs to sit back and laugh at all the chaos.
At least, that's what I thought.
Deadline deals don't fail that much more often than any other deals
My assumption: the players being signed on deadline day are being signed out of desperation. These are players acquired without as much due diligence and without as much scouting. A need must be met, someone decides to meet that need, and a suboptimal process leads to a suboptimal player. Then, the manager sees him play, realizes he's not good enough or he doesn't fit, and voilà. Another failed transfer. (See, for example: Arthur to Liverpool, last season.)
The reality: it's really not that bad. I mean, it is bad, but the hit rate of all transfers is bad.
In the Premier League, the average transfer plays under half of the minutes in his first season in the league. Since 2012, the average minutes share for every Premier League transfer costing at least €5 million is 49.5% of all available minutes. For deadline day deals, that share drops down to 46.7% -- that's a sizable difference, but it also accounts for only about 100 minutes across the entirety of a season. (All transfer data in the piece was provided by the consultancy Twenty First Group.)
On the high end, you've got Virgil van Dijk's 2015 deadline day move from Celtic to Southampton, after which he played every possible Premier League minute. VVD then went on to have an incredible and similarly omnipresent impact at one of the biggest clubs in the world. The same can't quite be said for the second name on the list: Marc Cucurella, who played 98% of the minutes for Brighton after joining from Getafe on deadline day in 2021. He joined Chelsea a year later and has since played only 45% of available league minutes.
The other players in deadline day deals who immediately featured in at least 90% of the minutes with their new clubs? David Luiz (from Paris Saint-Germain to Chelsea in 2016), Wout Faes (Stade Reims to Leicester last summer), and James McCarthy (Wigan to Everton, 2013). Luiz also appeared in 85% of the minutes for Arsenal after moving across London from Chelsea on deadline day in 2019.
Something about David Luiz -- the face of what panicked desperation and ultimate reliability look like when combined -- appearing twice here just feels so right.
Shaka Hislop is not convinced Matheus Nunes is the right match for Manchester City.
At the other end of the spectrum, Filip Benković (Dinamo Zagreb to Leicester, 2018) and Tiago Ilori (Sporting Lisbon to Liverpool, 2012) didn't play a single minute in their first seasons with their new clubs.
Some other notably not-impactful deadline day deals:
Georges-Kévin Nkoudou, MF, Marseille to Tottenham, 2016, €11 million: played 1.4% of minutes
Albian Ajeti, FW, Basel to West Ham, 2019, €11.3 million: 3.8%
Fernando Llorente, FW, Swansea to Tottenham, 2017, €15.1 million: 7.1%
Ryan Sessegnon, DF, Fulham to Tottenham, 2019, €27 million: 10%
Donny van de Beek, MF, Ajax to Manchester United, 2020, €39 million: 15%
Danny Drinkwater, MF, Leicester to Chelsea, 2017, €37.9 million: 16.6%
Through this lens, the most typical deadline day deal was Alex Iwobi's €30.4m move from Arsenal to Everton, where he featured in 46.9% of the minutes in his first season.
Teams don't overpay on deadline day either
Now, that previous section surprised me, but I think you can maybe explain away some of it.
Perhaps an outsize number of deadline day deals are for players at a position of immediate need. Teams are signing these guys because they need warm bodies, or because a few games have happened and they realized the current options they have aren't good enough, or whatever. There's at least a logic to many deadline day deals being for players with specifically clear pathways to more playing time.
- Transfer grades: Monaco a B for Balogun signing
But these moves, almost by definition, are desperate. In July, a team can move on to its next option if negotiations don't seem as if they're working out for whoever is number one on their list. On Sept. 1, if you don't sign the player you're trying to sign, then you both don't get him and don't get your second option, your third option or any other option. You don't get anyone.
Presumably, this situation would incentivize teams to cough up extra cash to make sure a deal gets done -- again, "presumably" here, because it's not actually clear that this happens. In fact, teams might actually get better deals by adding players on deadline day.
Now, I wouldn't take this analysis as concrete fact, given that we're using estimations and this data doesn't include the player contracts, which are a large chunk of the cost of a given transaction. But according to the Twenty First Group analysis, the average deadline day transfer costs 25% more than the crowd-sourced player valuations listed on the site Transfermarkt.
That, of course, is a massive premium -- but not when compared with the market on the whole. The average Premier League transfer costs 32% more than Transfermarkt valuation. So, since 2012, deadline day deals in the Premier League have actually been cheaper. Or rather: not as expensive.
Funnily enough, Manchester United have secured both the biggest value and the biggest overpays within this framework. In 2021, they acquired Cristiano Ronaldo for €17m despite a valuation of €45m. (He was on massive wages; this was, ultimately, a terrible deal.) And on deadline day in 2015, they shocked the world by spending €60m to acquire a 19-year-old attacker from Monaco named Anthony Martial. His Transfermarkt valuation at the time: €8m.
But despite those specific transactions and the fax machines, helicopters and flight trackers, deadline day might not actually be as irrational as it seems. Sometimes it seems that the teams doing the unloading are even more desperate than those who are loading up.
Thanks to Aurel Nazmiu for his assistance with the research.