The agent chuckles when asked whether his phone will be busy on deadline day. “I honestly don’t know what the football industry did before Whatsapp,” he says.
“Every morning in January you’ll wake up to five or six messages that were sent after midnight. I think everyone in football is sending those messages late at night or first thing in the morning through the whole month.
“It’s like the industry is living on Red Bull or espressos, just teeing up deals that largely don’t happen but they’re doing the work on just in case.
“Then on deadline day all hell breaks loose. The phone just lights up all day. Maybe ten or 15 years ago it was just the manager or the Chairman taking the lead on the deal, but nowadays there’s a team of analysts, the loan manager, the data scientist – they will all want to know some information about a player.
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Deadline day is football’s 24 hours of soap opera. “Footballers do enjoy it, watching it all play out,” says Jose Enrique, the former Newcastle and Liverpool player turned player agent who was speaking to inews in association with Boylesports football betting.
He was in the thick of the action one year, disaffected at Anfield, available for transfer but priced out of a move away by the Reds. Not that the message had got through to everyone.
“I was sat on my couch with my wife and they mentioned my name. I turned the volume up and they said I was at the Hawthorns about to sign for West Brom. I just said: ‘Am I?’ It was quite funny really.”
Another year, he was glued to the TV as his Newcastle team-mate Andy Carroll was flown by helicopter to Anfield. “None of us knew it was happening, not even him. We’d seen him the day before. He was a big player and it just sucked the life out of us,” he said.
Deals like Carroll’s are vanishingly rare on deadline day. But that’s not for lack of effort.
In offices up and down the country, the lights don’t go out until the early hours. “The cliché is true,” one executive says.
“It’s scattered pizza boxes, lots of coffee. Even when you’re not buying someone, there’s outgoings, under-23 players to take care of. And you’re always alive to getting that phone call on a deal you put the work into. It always runs late.”
Deadline day deals fall into three categories. The most common is the transfer that has been revived because something else has fallen through.
Then there is the ‘Hail Mary’ punts by agents aimed at desperate clubs that press the panic button before the 11pm deadline. One executive who spoke to the i believes these are “increasingly rare” as even teams in League One and Two have now assembled sophisticated recruitment teams.
But they still happen: “We get folders of clips emailed to us, unsolicited, at 3pm or 4pm with about seven hours before the deadline. Someone must be biting on those because it happens every year – and it’s always a bit of a surprise to see the player you’ve been emailed about actually got that move,” one executive said.
The final category is the move that has been bubbling away for weeks and weeks – but it is only on deadline day that a club is prepared to actually sanction it.
“It’s not possible to do a deal solely on deadline day. All the deals you see will have been lined up quite a long way in advance and you’re waiting for things to fall into place,” Brentford’s Director of Football Phil Giles told me.
“You’re never working on just one deal, you’re working on three or four. You have your preferred one over here and it’s a classic thing of spinning plates.
“You’re trying to do your preferred one but if that’s not possible and they’ve gone elsewhere you have to flip onto the next one and you try to get that done in time.”
The mid-season deadline is much more frantic because EFL clubs have all played 48 hours before the deadline.
“Everyone holds their breath on injuries. I had one deal fall through because two centre-backs got injured in the same match, they had to do an emergency defender deal and so a month’s work went down the drain,” the agent says.
For most executives, deadline day follows a strict script teed up on the off chance transfers can be brokered. “A lot of hard work goes in behind-the-scenes with, usually, not a lot to show for it,” one told i.
One says he schedules 8am calls on deadline day to colleagues to see if any of their “priority deals” can be resurrected. There are several slots booked in at private hospitals “just in case” medicals are required at short notice.
At the biggest clubs in the land, this isn’t a problem. Manchester United have an MRI scanner at their Carrington training ground just for that purpose.
As a consequence of Brexit and the Covid pandemic, it is now almost solely domestic business that can be done at short notice.
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“Before, you could have booked and flown a player over first thing in the morning, done the medical in the afternoon and signed him. But that’s not possible anymore – it needs to be much more advanced before that final day,” an executive admitted.
“Clubs in Europe are starting to realise that. January has been much more realistic – if clubs need the money, they’ve been more willing to talk.”
The next morning “everyone in football takes a break”. Except for the players, who just move on quickly. “It’s such a resilient profession. There’s maybe a joke and then they just crack on,” the agent said.
“If you’re in that situation where you want to leave it can be a really frustrating day,” Enrique concurs.
“January feels like the longest month – you may have been in talks for three or four weeks and it goes into the last few hours. But if you don’t get your move, you just get on with it.”
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