Daryl's Notebook: The Transfers (2025 January edition - Part 1)
Amidst the chaos and a ton of money spent, there seems to be a sense of calmness in the 2025 January window.
At the time of writing this post, teams only have just less than a week left to wheelin’ and dealin’ in the 2025 January window. So far, the window has been interesting for me for many reasons, with continuity and trends being highlighted all across the world. Usually, the January window is a chaotic window where teams seeking opportunities to bring in players that can help the team for the rest of the season, or even beyond half a season. Because of the chaotic nature of the window, there tends to be a lot of wrong moves being made in this month and a lot of money wasted.
In recent seasons, however, teams have gotten smarter and that chaotic nature has slowly faded away. But that does not mean that it has gone completely, there are still teams who are scrambling to buy players and are willing to overpay for a player that they think might be a useful addition to the team. That seems to be the general theme for this window, at least for me. Amongst the chaos, there is a sense of calmness with the approach of some teams that I will get into in just a bit.
For now, though, let’s start with some observations about the window from within England and the UK, where most of the activities are happening.
The general trend
This has been happening for a few windows now, but teams are focusing more and more on young players, and they are worth more in recent years. I actually planned to write an article looking at this trend back during the summer window, when the Football Manager Youtuber, Zealand, posed a question about why a player like Dani Olmo did not attract a lot of interest before Barcelona went in for him. I even went as far as gathered my own data from Transfermarkt and wrote up some code, in R (not Python this time!), to produce some visualisations that I will now use them here.
Even though players who are entering or at their peak age still command the highest transfer fees, the transfer fee for young players is slowly rising year by year, which happens for both the under-19 and the 19 to 24 age groups. Teams see young players as an investment because they are raw products that can be trained and can develop into a better player when given better facilities and work with better coaches and teammates. That is why many teams are willing to take a risk on players who we might not even know of by bring them in at a very young age, then either have them stay at the club for internal development, or loan them out to give them first team football at a level that might suit them.
Because of this shift in the transfer market, most top European teams have slowly adopted buying young players as their approach for the past few windows. This is very evident with most English teams, particularly Chelsea, the Manchester duos, and Tottenham Hotspur. Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain have taken this approach to another extreme and basically become talent hoarders.
This also comes as a setback for some teams, particularly Borussia Dortmund, who is known to be one of the best talent developers. They have had to switch their approach to buying older players in recent seasons, and frankly, they do not have that many standout youngsters this season besides Jamie Gittens, Karim Adeyemi, and Maximilian Beier. This might be one of the reasons for their downfall this season, along with the fact that Nuri Sahin is definitely not ready for the hotseat at the Signal-Iduna Park.
A rebuild for the ages
The general trend continues into this window, headlining by Manchester City’s rebuild. Yes, I am slightly confident in saying that City are starting their rebuild this window and they have used the team’s drop in form as sort of an excuse to go in hard this January window. I doubt that this is a sign that City are panic-buying, even highly doubt that they are throwing money out of the window. When you have a team of the best football data scientists and analysts as the backbone and are being trusted to do their job, most of their decisions are likely not made out of thin air.
As rightly pointed out by JJ Bull and Jon Mackenzie in The Athletic FC/Tifo Football’s video below, City actually had a tough time to rebuild when they were at their very best, which was right after the treble-winning season. Most of their players were entering or were getting out of their peak, and they were demanding better contracts to reward their performance on the pitch. I am too lazy to create an age distribution plot for the current Man City squad, but most of their current squad are currently in their very late-20s or have already gone into their 30s, including key players like Kevin de Bruyne or Jack Grealish (jeesh!).
This is not to say the young players they are bringing up from their academy are not promising, but they are currently not good enough for Pep to confidently use them week in, week out and have them fill in the spots of injured or rested players. I have taken over a Man City team in FM24 that had a 4-or-5-year transfer ban, was relegated down to the National League, and had to rely only on homegrown players from the academy to get back up to the Premier League, so I am aware of players like Jahmai Simpson-Pusey, Nico O’Reilly, or Divin Mubama. (Side note: Look out for Spike Brits. He might be raw right now and won’t break into City’s first team very soon, but he has the potential to be a great modern goalkeeper.)
Because of the factors above, along with a few more, this just creates the perfect opportunity for City to start their rebuild straight away and freshen the team up. While Manuel Akanji, Nathan Aké, and Rúben Dias have locked in a centre-back starting spot for the next few years (not counting Joško Gvardiol because he is playing as a hybrid centre-back/left-back now), the gap between them and the likes of Simpson-Pusey or O’Reilly is just so far right now, which means that trio do not have reliable backups that can step up to rotate with them. That leads us to the signings of Abdukodir Khusanov from Lens and Vitor Reis from Palmeiras.
If you have followed my blog since the restart or following ScoutedFtbl for a while, you would have known about Khusanov already. I wrote about the Uzbek centre-back in this edition of the Notebook, where I reviewed his performance against Strasbourg and looked at his data at Lens up until October. Long story short, he is a very good traditional centre-back who defends well and has both the physicality and pace to get stuck into challenges, which can sometimes get quite rough for him. The downside for him is he has not developed his ball-playing skills yet, and the toughness of the Premier League showcased that weakness of Khusanov straight away in his debut.
What I will say about Khusanov, and will probably say the same for Reis and Juma Bah, who City signed from Real Valladolid then loaned out to Lens, is that all three are very young. This surprised me a lot, but Khusanov went from the Uzbek league to the Premier League in less than five years, and he played in less than two full seasons for Lens in Ligue 1. He is still very, very raw, but at the very least, he has shown that he can adapt to the nature of European football.
He can only get better at City, and the club seems like the perfect development environment for all three because Pep embraces giving youngsters a chance and encouraging them to be the best version of themselves. He will make mistakes and errors here or there, it is unavoidable for a young Uzbek player like Khusanov, but stick by him and he will become a monster in the next few years.
Same thing goes for Juma Bah because he is literally a talent out of nowhere. He even played in less matches for Valladolid (12 first-team matches in less than 6 months!) than the number of matches Khusanov played for Lens (24 first-team matches in two seasons). He is 18, just freshly came from Sierra Leone and had little time to adapt to Spain, and now he has to adapt to French football before heading back to England. That is a lot for an 18-year-old coming from Africa.
But like the trend that I have shown above, City knows what they are doing because they are literally investing in the future of their defence. At the time of writing, Bah is 18 years old, Khusanov is 20 years old, and Reis is 19 years old. The money that they paid to Valladolid, Lens, and Palmeiras respectively might seem like a lot now, but they will not be in a few years time. City backroom staff, scouts, and data nerds clearly see something in these three, and that was why they went in hard and early for all three.
Continuing with City’s defence and it seems like they are also pushing hard to complete the deal for Andrea Cambiasso and Douglas Luiz from Juventus, according to rumours that I have read at the time of writing this article. Coincidentally, I have just finished watching a Juventus match for a later edition of the Notebook (coming out soon) so I can give my thoughts here!
Cambiasso is just the perfect player for Man City and Pep considering how he is currently used by Thiago Motta at Juventus. As a left-back against Atalanta, he constantly made underlapping runs and operated inside the half-space, which allowed Manuel Locatelli to drop into his position and play as the third centre-back to make the most of Loca’s passing ability. The Italian left-back is good offensively and is skillful enough to take on opposition players and get past them. From this description, there is one former Man City players that you can compare Cambiasso to. If you guessed João Cancelo, then you are definitely right. Cambiasso is quite similar to Cancelo, except for the fact that Cambiasso plays on the left while Cancelo plays on the right. But Cambiasso is also a slightly blank canvas that gives Pep an opportunity to develop him into whatever type of player that he sees him to be.
Douglas Luiz did not play this match so I cannot say much about the Brazilian, but I know how good he was at Aston Villa. This transfer felt a bit weird to me since he joined Juventus just six months ago? However, with City not able to chase Sociedad’s Martín Zubimendi until next summer, Douglas Luiz feels like a decent replacement for Rodrigo Hernández (aka Rodri) right now. He is strong defensively, which feels like the one thing that City midfield is missing right now even though Mateo Kovačić should have been decent enough at that.
If they do end up getting Luiz, Pep might need to change his build-up shape a bit to accommodate the fact that Luiz is slightly more defensive-minded even though the Brazilian’s passing ability is not that bad. But for a temporary replacement for Rodri up until the summer, when they can finally chase Zubimendi, Luiz seems like not that bad of an option.
Going back to already confirmed signings and we have to talk about the transfer of Omar Marmoush from Eintracht Frankfurt. This also feels a bit weird for me because me and my best friend did watch him when he was at Wolfsburg, and the Egyptian was not good back then. I would go so far to say that Mohamed Amoura is currently having a better season at Wolfsburg than Marmoush’s season with the Wolves. But there is just something about Frankfurt and developing attackers because Marmoush just took off when he joined them and became a prolific goal-scorer in the Bundesliga.
City looks like they need another goal-scoring outlet other than Erling Haaland up top. The Norwegian is no doubt a world class striker, but when he is isolated up top and inside of the box, City will find it hard to score goals. Grealish, Phil Foden, Jérémy Doku, and Sávio can provide a few goals here and there, but it is not enough to sustain a high-performing team like City, and they are better-suited at creating goals anyway. Marmoush is a versatile player who can both play as a centre forward (like he did for Frankfurt before Hugo Ekitiké joined) and as a winger, which will give Pep another good goal-contributing outlet up front.
Overall, while other top Premier League teams seem to be a bit panicking (looking at you, Man United and Spurs!) that they do not know who to buy, Man City looked like they went into this window with a concrete plan, and that plan was to execute the rebuild right away. They have not been too active in the market for the past few windows and held on to the treble-winning core, and with a few dark arts of sponsorship, City can navigate the threats from the Profit & Sustainability Rules and Financial Fair Play to invest in a young team that can maintain their stance that is one of the best teams in the world.
Looking beyond the borders
Taking the spotlight away from Man City and the Premier League, I want to focus on the three lower divisions because something interesting is happening within the EFL leagues. Andy Watson and the team at GBE Expert Hub are doing a good job covering this (I have linked a great article explaining ESC slots from his team below), but basically, a lot of lower league clubs are looking towards undervalued markets to sign players to fill their ESC slots.
There are some finer details that go into how each club receives ESC slots, which Andy and his team has explained in the article, so I will not go into it because of how complicated it can get. But long story short (and I will try to use Football Manager terms to explain this), ESC slots are allocated to Championship, League One, and League Two clubs (after some evaluations and criteria) for players who do not have enough points to qualify for a British work permit. This does not mean that EFL clubs have a foreign players cap like most Asian leagues, they can still sign players who qualify for a work permit like players who have played regularly for their international team, etc. This just means they can sign players who do not meet the point threshold for a work permit, which opens up the opportunity for clubs to go to undervalued markets to sign players.
A good example of this is Stockport County signing Benoný Breki Andrésson, an Icelandic striker from KR in the top division of Iceland this January window. Andrésson did play for Bologna for a couple of seasons so he has left his home country before, but this is the first time Andrésson goes straight into the first team of a non-Icelandic team. There are good reasons for Stockport, one of the better examples of a well-run club in the EFL system, to sign Andrésson, particularly because of his 2023-24 season with KR where he scored 30 goals in 51 matches at just 18 years old.
Following the trend that I have pointed out above, Andrésson feels like a good investment for the club because he is only 19 years old at the time of writing. It will take a bit of time for him to adapt to the League One level, but he definitely has potential to be a good striker not just for Stockport, but also for other Championship teams a few years down the line. On the business side of things, Andrésson can definitely bring back some profit for the club if he can demonstrate his form at KR, which will allow the club to continue finding undervalued players from other markets.
And it is not just Stockport who are looking into undervalued markets either. As Andy pointed out in this article, more EFL clubs are looking into the J.League and the Scandinavian leagues as potential markets to sign players. There are more Japanese playing in the EFL now than as far as I can remember following football (which is around the early 2010s), while there were only a few in the past and most of them were playing in the Premier League. Examples that come directly from the J1 League last summer includes Ayumu Yokohama to Birmingham City from Sagan Tosu, Yu Hirakawa to Bristol City from Machida Zelvia, Yuki Ohashi to Blackburn Rovers from Sanfrecce Hiroshima, and Tatsuki Seko to Stoke City from Kawasaki Frontale. Obviously the success of Ange Postecoglou’s Celtic up north has opened up the market for Japanese players, but it is great to see more clubs paying a close attention to the J League.
I will touch on the Australian A-League in part 2 using my observations of the league as someone who is directly witnessing the rise of the league from within the country, so look out for that!
The fact that most of these players are coming in not just to make up numbers either, they are either playing week in, week out, or they are solid rotational options for Championship or League One clubs. Take Szabolcs Schön for example, only 24 years old, a former Jong Ajax Amsterdam player, has played for FC Dallas in the MLS, and a Hungarian international. Bolton Wanderers signed him from Fehérvár in the summer of 2024 and he has played 26 League One matches for Bolton while also scored one and assisted three. Just like his international teammate, Callum Styles, who used to be at Barnsley, Schön is making a difference for Bolton in League One.
With the introduction of the ESC slots for EFL clubs, there has been a shift in how lower league clubs approach foreign markets. They are more open to sign foreign players and smarter clubs have seek out for undervalued players to take them to an environment where they can grow and develop as a player. Some of them are low-risk investments for clubs because they do not pay a ton of money for the service of those players. In return, they are getting a player who can potentially contribute week in, week out for the first team squad, and then bring back profit if they are then sold down the line. Obviously there are still signings who did not or has not worked out, that is unavoidable, but English clubs are getting better and better at identifying players that can actually contribute for the team, and that wrong signing rate will only decrease as time goes on.
With part 1 of this two-part Transfers edition of the Notebook, I looked into interesting trends that are happening in the UK and England. Not that all right decisions have been made by English clubs, but there is a reason why they are one of the best footballing countries in the world and one of the most attractive destinations for any player. At the end of the day, I just like learning about new things and the trends that have been identified have given me a different perspective about English clubs.
Part 2 will be about the rest of the world, where I will be focusing on an interesting European club along with two countries who are taking the transfer market by storm. Yes, football happens in other countries other than England as well, and I want to put the spotlight onto what they are doing well! So, see you in part 2!