It’s a wild soccer summer. With Saudi Arabia, a new player is throwing petrodollars around. Many players gratefully accept the offers. Now the fear is going around in the clubs: the Pro League still has 19 days to change the statics of European football.
The yellow suits have already been laid out, the smartphones charged, the power banks stowed away as backup: Friday is finally Deadline Day in European football again. The transfer window is closing. One day after the draw for the Champions League, when the Losfee plays fate again and the last changes are made hectically. A striker here, a winger there and suddenly someone even finds a useful full-back. What a show this third half of the football season is.
Right in the middle then again the transfer gurus, the heralds of absolute truth. “Here we go” and “deal done” it says again. The transfer journalist brigade won’t sleep, they don’t do it any more anyway. “My job knows no time. There is news that I implemented at 2:30 a.m., others at eight in the morning. If you do it the way I want it, you have to be omnipresent and awake,” said Transferjournalismus-Shooting- Star Plettenberg recently at DWDL.
Plettenberg calls himself on X, which was previously called Twitter, Plettigoal, works for Sky and is always close. Sometimes he also sends messages from the toilet. Transfers wait for no one. Until the window finally closes. Then there is peace. “There are only two months that are quiet. That’s September, so after Deadline Day in the summer,” Plettenberg reported in early August, perhaps overwhelmed by all the news about Harry Kane’s transfer. It seemed that he was in charge of bringing him over the line, as they say. He was the orchestra leader of madness. He begged the England captain to make a move and despaired of Tottenham Hotspur’s hard-hearted negotiator, Daniel Levy.
Saudi Arabia transfer window closes on September 20th
Plettenberg is not even wrong. It was always quiet before. Not just because amplifiers like Plettenberg didn’t exist. The window used to close and then the excitement was over. Now it really starts.
From Saturday 2 September, the squads of clubs in the major leagues of the continent and the islands that are no longer affiliated must be in place. But the fear is there. Everything is different this time. “For the Saudis, the transfer period is another three weeks and that can cause a lot of unrest,” former football manager and current player advisor Michael Reschke told the “Münchener Merkur” these days. There it was again: the kingdom that is making the headlines in football in this rainy summer of 2023 and is on an aggressive course of expansion. The transfer window closes on there September 20th. Enough time for one or the other offer that nobody can refuse.
This realization is not only likely to rob Plettenberg of his sleep, but also the clubs, who, in addition to the usual last-minute transfers, suddenly have to deal with something that might be possible. The weeks starting next Saturday have the potential to throw a club’s entire season planning upside down and cause major shocks in Europe. Title favorites could suddenly become clubs that are only playing for a place in the Champions League, and a departure this season could decide the weal and woe in the coming years.
Because the new Champions League from the 2024/25 season promises to be an even better money printing machine with its 36 clubs and its new format. Don’t miss it. Otherwise things could get tight in the future. Especially for the clubs in Germany, which will compete alongside Bayern Munich for entry into the premier class this season. But also for the clubs in Italy and France, in Spain and of course England.
And suddenly this danger is there. Suddenly anything can happen. If a club from Saudi Arabia would offer 150 million euros for Joshua Kimmich, Bayern could hardly defend themselves. When a Pro League club wants Leipzig’s up-and-coming star Dani Olmo, things get tight for the lawn ball athletes. But the German league is still flying under the radar. A blessing for squad planners.
Advantage Newcastle United
The conspiracy theorists are also getting their money’s worth these days. What about the exits from the Premier League after September 1st, you might ask? In England, Newcastle United is known to be a club in the hands of the Saudi state fund PIF, which also pulls the strings at four clubs in the Pro League in the desert. Since June, the PIF has held 75 percent of the shares in each of the top clubs Al-Nassr, Al-Hilal, Al-Ittihad and Al-Ahli.
That makes the new rumors of Liverpool’s Egyptian superstar Mo Salah moving to Saudi Arabia all the more delicate. Salah is a logical transfer target for the Saudis. He is the biggest star in the Maghreb region, his name radiating both internally and externally. He is predestined for a change and yet a transfer should cause a lot of trouble. Coach Jürgen Klopp’s Reds are very likely to be dueling Newcastle United for a place in the premier league this season.
The Premier League will not be able to stop such transfers, anti-competitive as they appear. When they approved the sale of Newcastle United in 2021, they ruled that the PIF and Saudi Arabia have no ties and even got legally binding assurances on top of that: Saudi Arabia will not take control of Newcastle United.
The Saudi transfer offensive can hit any club, not just the English ones. In Spain, coach Diego Simeone complained about the rumors about his player Joao Felix this week. The Portuguese would like to leave Atlético Madrid, preferably to Barcelona, but Al-Hilal is also interested. They lurk for their chance and Simeone is powerless. “We’re waiting and we don’t know if he’s going to stay or not. In general, there’s always a chance that a player will move after the transfer window has ended, especially since Saudi Arabia still has two weeks left,” he explained these days: “I repeat it again: This is the greatest danger of all!”
Toni Kroos one of many reminders
Not only is it the biggest threat to European football, it’s a whole new one. One that otherwise only the Europeans radiated. In recent years, they have been used in South America again and again, even if the season was already underway in the leagues there. Now Europe is on the defensive. A turning point and “a danger for football of the future,” said Toni Kroos recently about the wild changes this summer: “Such a cut in his sporting career, reducing his claims just because of the money, I’m not a fan of that is an incredibly bad role model for many young youth players that money is the motivation.” He spoke about the young Gabriel Vega, who at the age of 21 did not switch to SSC Napoli but to Al-Ahli. At least during the European transfer summer.
With all the imponderables of the coming weeks: A winner has already been determined. Plettenberg rival Fabrizio Romano is very close to Saudi Arabia and is therefore probably not planning a summer slumber. The other day he was overwhelmed on his favorite network X. It was not about a new 100 million change, it was about Cristiano Ronaldo as a footballer and probably also about advertising.
This Ronaldo who “scores in Saudi Arabia and wins title“, and his wife Georgina Rodriguez were on the cover of “Vogue”. There she advertised Laverne, a perfume brand from Riyadh. Of course, it was linked quite neatly. The Italian, which football fans cannot escape this summer , must have been bursting with pride at being able to provide such comprehensive information to his more than 18 million followers on platform X, formerly known as Twitter. It shouldn’t have hurt his account either. Maybe even the opposite of that Buy Europe little Saudi Arabia has completely changed the playing field At least Romano has already adapted Normalization has long since begun Watch it on your streaming platform of choice