No

by Natalie M. Wolverson

Created on: November 05, 2009

The football transfer window allows clubs to buy and sell players within a certain time period through the season. When this window is closed no more transfers can take place and players must stay with their current club until the next window.

Why do I believe that this idea should be kept intact rather than scrapped? Well first of all if the window was always open players would be much more distracted as they would be wondering where their future lay and if they were going to be transferred and so on. With transfers only happening every so often is it easier to focus on the task at hand and helping your club, rather than being put off by rumours spread by other managers or the media.

The system also protects smaller clubs who may have a young star or a key player that many of the larger clubs may want to purchase, as the smaller club can hold on to the player for a longer time than if the window was always open. It makes it easier for smaller clubs to keep key players which are a vital part of the team, but it also allows them to get more money for players as larger clubs would be willing to pay more to ensure that they get the player faster than waiting for slow negotiations to take place.

By restricting spending to certain months, the system makes competition a little harder because a key player may have picked up an injury, but the team can't buy a replacement they have to rely on reserve players. This also works when a team may be struggling - they can't just go out and buy a star player, they have to pull results out of the bag using what they have.

It also gives the reserve and youth players a chance to play as the first team players may be fatigued or injured and the manager can't go and buy a replacement until January. This is great for English football as many of our top players end up playing with teams such as Real Madrid or Inter Milan, so we need to rely on our youth players and this allows them to gain valuable experience for the future.

Another common problem with opening the window all year round would be that richer clubs such as Manchester City would be able to buy any player they wanted at any given time. This means that even if they didn't need the player they could purchase him to stop other clubs having him or just because they have the money to waste. Allowing a big club to spend continuously all year round would ultimately end in disaster and also prevent any real competition being shown from smaller or poorer teams.

Overall I don't think that it would be viable for the window to be open all year round and would cause a lot of legitimate and unsolvable problems. It would be a complete backwards step for the modern game of football and could ruin it completely for some of the smaller teams. Football is already unbalanced with big clubs being allowed to spend infinite amounts of money so why should we let them spend whenever they want to and more often?

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