Who gave this window a 5/10?
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Also, a special mention to the youth signings made, excellent to see us focus on the here and now as well as some for the future. Devine the pick of the bunch but with additions such as Ferguson, Lavinier, Omole and the two Estonian kids it’s nice to see us focus on a solid internal pipeline.
6 senior signings and at least 6 youth signings, very pleasing to see.
6 senior signings and at least 6 youth signings, very pleasing to see.
I went 10/10. I get why 9/10 is the most common selection but I really think that is some of the Skinrar transfer not happening biasing us.
Think back to before the window and everyone agreed we needed three positions... RB, CDM, backup Striker. We brought in players at each of those positions, two of who are PL proven and already making an impact.
On top of that we brought in a young, dynamic LB.
The cherry on top is Gareth Bale coming home. I just cannot give a window like that anything but a 10, even if bringing in a CB would have been great as well.
Think back to before the window and everyone agreed we needed three positions... RB, CDM, backup Striker. We brought in players at each of those positions, two of who are PL proven and already making an impact.
On top of that we brought in a young, dynamic LB.
The cherry on top is Gareth Bale coming home. I just cannot give a window like that anything but a 10, even if bringing in a CB would have been great as well.
I'm not sure how anybody could give this anything less than 10 out of 10.
We have retained the worlds best strike pairing (Kane and Son).
In Bale, we have on of the worlds top top players.
PEH is a beast who is bossing midfield.
Sergio looks to have a very high ceiling.
We have (thus far) retained Aurier who gives 110% every time he plays.
Will be interesting to see how Doherty and Vinícius develop over the season.
Let's face it; it would be a MIRACLE if at least one of the signings wasn't a complete flop in their first season, but on initial impressions (PEH, Doherty, Sergio, Hart) ; things are looking positive.
Before this window started we were talking about Deeney, Aarons and Zaha!
We have retained the worlds best strike pairing (Kane and Son).
In Bale, we have on of the worlds top top players.
PEH is a beast who is bossing midfield.
Sergio looks to have a very high ceiling.
We have (thus far) retained Aurier who gives 110% every time he plays.
Will be interesting to see how Doherty and Vinícius develop over the season.
Let's face it; it would be a MIRACLE if at least one of the signings wasn't a complete flop in their first season, but on initial impressions (PEH, Doherty, Sergio, Hart) ; things are looking positive.
Before this window started we were talking about Deeney, Aarons and Zaha!
Fair point, once you reach 20m you're looking at teenage superstar money and that's something Rodon is definitely not ... 7/10/12m probably OK but 20m? I agree that would not be great value.
100 percent agreed. Just think that we should save the money and get a first choice centre back next summer instead. We already have Japhet as our young cb and I don't think Rodon would immediately improve the first Xi, which is what we really need
We are very much still in discussion for Kim Min-jae, his Chinese contract expires December 2021 so he will be in his final year come the January Window lots of media in Asia saying we have already agreed personal terms and are just waiting to get the price down to around 15m.
He would bring us even more great PR in Asia as he's a bit of a legend, nicknamed 'monster' because for an Asian he's blooming massive .... 15m probably pays for itself in marketing so very low risk.
Not an automatic starter but has experience both domestically and at International level.
Saddest human on TFCAirfixx and his multis all voted 10/10.
ZidaneWho gave this window a 5/10?
Easily 9/10 for me
Why the disagree
jonomarch
?It's fine to disagree, but at least have the balls to stand up and say why.
You look a bit of a twat disagreeing with people's opinions in a thread asking specifically for people's opinions then not even participating in the discussions yourself.
8.5 I'd say. Half-points taken off for not addressing the CB question (or if we do with this Swansea lad, not in time for the UEFA Cup) squad - that said, it wasn't an absolute nailed-on, throw-my-toys-out-of-the-pram priority for me - and concerns about Reguilón's buy-back clause and Bale's fitness.
But no complaints at all, well done to all concerned
But no complaints at all, well done to all concerned
I gave it a 9. Central Defence is the big question mark. It would be extremely helpful if we could somehow improve the performances of Sanchez and if Tanganga develops into a good CH.
Generous.
I'll give it a solid 6. No more, no less.
I think a lot of us are voting on the euphoria of the last few results.. The adrenaline rush taking a hold and getting to our heads. Understandable. No harm in that.
But I prefer to say it as it is, rather than pander to the crowd.
And in the cold light of day, we've failed to improve certain positions like centre back, maybe marginally improved right back, we still have Winks and Sissoko, and we've taken Burnley's 3rd choice keeper with the soapiest hands in football and promoted him to No 2.
Hojbjerg looks solid. Could be good business, and Regullion looks the stand out of the window, although the buy back clause kind of belittles us as a club in my opinion.
Bale. Most exciting thing to happen for over a decade. But it is , after all, a loan. And well done to Daniel for wrapping it up, but considering Bale said Spurs was the only English team he would consider, he couldn't really say no.
We have one of the greatest managers in the history of the game. Respect for Daniel Levy for putting him in place
Only time will tell wether this transfer window has given him the tools he needs to keep that record intact .
COYMFS!
8/10.
15 years ago we would have had the same window only to flog Kane to United on the last day.
Just that makes it a 7. +1 for getting Bale back and plugging the holes.
15 years ago we would have had the same window only to flog Kane to United on the last day.
Just that makes it a 7. +1 for getting Bale back and plugging the holes.
You can't judge a window until the end of the season surely?
But
Only one "winner" of the transfer window and that's Mendes..............
The coronavirus pandemic has sent the soccer industry reeling, but money still flows to Mendes, one of the world’s most powerful agents. He just wrapped up another extremely profitable summer.
The soccer economy is reeling. Every week there appears to be a new, dizzying figure highlighting the financial crunch the industry is facing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. More than $115 million in losses at Barcelona alone. Hundreds of millions more in rebates to television rights holders. Across Europe, losses are expected to climb as high as $4.5 billion.
But the crisis has also created a few winners. Among the biggest has been Jorge Mendes, the Portuguese businessman and player agent, who for the last two decades has regularly taken a healthy slice from the $7 billion-a-year player transfer market. This year, despite soccer’s meltdown, Mendes appears to be doing better than ever.
In the transfer window that closed Monday night in Europe, Mendes sent Benfica’s Rúben Dias to Manchester City for $80 million, then replaced him in Lisbon with another client. He eased James Rodríguez out of Real Madrid’s doghouse and into a starring role at Everton, and arranged for Wolverhampton to sell the Irish defender Matt Doherty to Tottenham ($20 million) and the Portuguese forward Diogo Jota to Liverpool ($53 million).
And even as he completed those last two sales, Mendes helpfully persuaded Wolves to spend some of the money it received in his own shop: Wolves replaced Doherty with another Mendes client, Nelson Semedo, and used most of the money from Jota’s sale to recruit two rising talents — two more deals driven by Mendes — from F.C. Porto.
Across the board, from the unheralded signing to the headlining-grabbing move, Mendes left his imprint across Europe again. This summer’s deals alone have produced hundreds of millions of dollars in players sales, and — perhaps more important to Mendes and his agency, Gestifute — tens of millions of dollars in commissions.
“It seems he is not touched by the crisis,” said Pippo Russo, the author of a book that charted the rise of Mendes, 54, from Portuguese nightclub manager to one of soccer’s most dominant actors. “We can say the economic power network of Jorge Mendes resisted the coronavirus. It is as if he has the vaccine.”
Permanently tanned, impeccably dressed and usually outfitted with a pair of glistening white earphones to field calls, Mendes is never off duty, never pausing in his efforts to cultivate new inroads that could yield new and richer deals. The Mendes business model is built upon relationships, and this summer’s transfer window has seen him leverage them to full effect.
Operating deftly in an unstable marketplace, Mendes worked with both financially stricken clubs looking to balance their books and with the few cash-rich outfits that saw opportunity amid the financial uncertainty. The roots of his business are now so entrenched, in fact, that in some cases he and his company are represented on all sides — buying club, selling club and player — of a given deal.
In one recent example — the move of Doherty, a 28-year-old Irish defender, from Wolverhampton to Tottenham — the guiding hand of Mendes touched every facet of the deal.
Wolves, you see, is owned by Fosun International, a Chinese conglomerate that also holds a minority stake in Gestifute. And Doherty, who turned to Mendes earlier this year to guide his career, left a club managed by Mendes’s first professional client, Nuno Espirito Santo, to join a team coached by one of Mendes’s most high-profile clients, José Mourinho.
Wolves’s relationship with Mendes has been the subject of scrutiny in English soccer, with rival clubs complaining about his close ties to Fosun, to Espirito Santo and to a handful of the players on the team’s roster. An investigation by the Football League, which is responsible for the three professional tiers of English soccer below the Premier League, found that there were no breaches in how Wolves — bolstered by a clutch of Mendes-linked players from Portugal — secured promotion to England’s top flight in 2018.
But Mendes’s dealings with the club, and others, run deep. Wolves — and Mendes — were also at the center of two curious trades this summer involving F.C. Porto, a Portuguese champion with a two-decade link to the agent.
On the cusp of a financial meltdown, and with large debts coming due, Porto turned to Mendes to find buyers for some of its up-and-coming stars. In a feat of alchemy that Mendes appears to have honed to perfection, Mendes convinced Fosun, his Chinese partners at Wolves, to pay what could be as much as $70 million for two highly rated though largely untested youngsters: Vitor Ferreira, a 20-year-old midfielder known as Vitinha, and Fábio Silva, an 18-year-old forward.
A quarter of the 40 million euro fee for Silva ended up in agents commissions, Porto announced, with most of it going to Mendes.
The size of Mendes’s commission for Silva was eye-catching, and considerably above the industry average, but not uncommon: Last year, when Mendes arranged the $138 million sale of the Benfica teenager João Felix to Atlético Madrid, he reportedly earned about $35 million in the deal.
Still, it was another sign that whatever measures soccer’s governing body, FIFA, imposes to try to curb the excesses of the transfer market, the most canny operators are always able to generate sky-high returns.
Porto, which is regulated on the Portuguese stock market, declined to explain why it had agreed to part with 25 percent of the sale price for Silva in commissions.
A spokeswoman for Mendes declined to comment on any of Mendes’s past or present deals, saying the agent never discusses his business publicly.
Portuguese agents have privately fumed about Mendes’s influence over the industry for years. Yet Mendes is so well-connected that clubs routinely call on him to grease the wheels of deals even when he is not affiliated with the player in question. In January, for example, he was paid $8 million for helping arrange for Braga, a mid-ranking Portuguese team, to sell its young forward Francisco Trincão to Barcelona. Trincão’s registered agents were not involved in the sale.
In 2018, the president of Benfica, Portugal’s biggest team, described Mendes’s role as akin to a taxi service, ferrying out the club’s best assets in one direction and ferrying in millions of dollars in the other.
Last week, Mendes helped Benfica replenish its accounts once again. Benfica agreed to send striker Carlos Vinicius on loan to Tottenham under an agreement in which the London team will have to pay 40 million euros to make the deal permanent next summer, and then it sold Dias, a talented defender, to Manchester City for a fee of 68 million euros (about $80 million).
Dias’s arrival at Manchester City was bad news for Nicolas Otamendi, since he plays the same position. But Mendes had a solution there, too: Otamendi was promptly sold to Benfica for $18 million, slotting neatly into the space Dias had vacated. Mendes, as Otamendi’s agent, cashed in again.
His ties with clubs and executives have at times allowed Mendes’s operation to seem like a carousel on which a never ending cast of athletes floats from one club to another. In collecting commissions each time, Mendes directs a system that sometimes seems as sophisticated, and as meticulously choreographed, as anything a coach might direct on the field.
Mendes rarely gives interviews, but he was required in 2017 to explain how his business operated at a court hearing in Spain, where the authorities charged a number of his clients, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Mourinho, with tax evasion. Most of the cases were resolved with guilty pleas and fines.
Mendes told the Spanish court he knew nothing about his clients’ tax arrangements, saying he had hired professionals to deal with those affairs. His focus, he said, was purely on guiding their careers.
“I dedicate myself only to this, trying to find the best solutions for my players, and spending a year is like spending a minute,” he said, according to news reports at the time. “I try to dedicate my time to my family and spend my life working, on the phone until midnight.”
This year, even when soccer ground to a halt, Mendes kept right on working. He remains the agent always ready with a solution, providing clubs can afford his fee.
But
Only one "winner" of the transfer window and that's Mendes..............
The coronavirus pandemic has sent the soccer industry reeling, but money still flows to Mendes, one of the world’s most powerful agents. He just wrapped up another extremely profitable summer.
The soccer economy is reeling. Every week there appears to be a new, dizzying figure highlighting the financial crunch the industry is facing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. More than $115 million in losses at Barcelona alone. Hundreds of millions more in rebates to television rights holders. Across Europe, losses are expected to climb as high as $4.5 billion.
But the crisis has also created a few winners. Among the biggest has been Jorge Mendes, the Portuguese businessman and player agent, who for the last two decades has regularly taken a healthy slice from the $7 billion-a-year player transfer market. This year, despite soccer’s meltdown, Mendes appears to be doing better than ever.
In the transfer window that closed Monday night in Europe, Mendes sent Benfica’s Rúben Dias to Manchester City for $80 million, then replaced him in Lisbon with another client. He eased James Rodríguez out of Real Madrid’s doghouse and into a starring role at Everton, and arranged for Wolverhampton to sell the Irish defender Matt Doherty to Tottenham ($20 million) and the Portuguese forward Diogo Jota to Liverpool ($53 million).
And even as he completed those last two sales, Mendes helpfully persuaded Wolves to spend some of the money it received in his own shop: Wolves replaced Doherty with another Mendes client, Nelson Semedo, and used most of the money from Jota’s sale to recruit two rising talents — two more deals driven by Mendes — from F.C. Porto.
Across the board, from the unheralded signing to the headlining-grabbing move, Mendes left his imprint across Europe again. This summer’s deals alone have produced hundreds of millions of dollars in players sales, and — perhaps more important to Mendes and his agency, Gestifute — tens of millions of dollars in commissions.
“It seems he is not touched by the crisis,” said Pippo Russo, the author of a book that charted the rise of Mendes, 54, from Portuguese nightclub manager to one of soccer’s most dominant actors. “We can say the economic power network of Jorge Mendes resisted the coronavirus. It is as if he has the vaccine.”
Permanently tanned, impeccably dressed and usually outfitted with a pair of glistening white earphones to field calls, Mendes is never off duty, never pausing in his efforts to cultivate new inroads that could yield new and richer deals. The Mendes business model is built upon relationships, and this summer’s transfer window has seen him leverage them to full effect.
Operating deftly in an unstable marketplace, Mendes worked with both financially stricken clubs looking to balance their books and with the few cash-rich outfits that saw opportunity amid the financial uncertainty. The roots of his business are now so entrenched, in fact, that in some cases he and his company are represented on all sides — buying club, selling club and player — of a given deal.
In one recent example — the move of Doherty, a 28-year-old Irish defender, from Wolverhampton to Tottenham — the guiding hand of Mendes touched every facet of the deal.
Wolves, you see, is owned by Fosun International, a Chinese conglomerate that also holds a minority stake in Gestifute. And Doherty, who turned to Mendes earlier this year to guide his career, left a club managed by Mendes’s first professional client, Nuno Espirito Santo, to join a team coached by one of Mendes’s most high-profile clients, José Mourinho.
Wolves’s relationship with Mendes has been the subject of scrutiny in English soccer, with rival clubs complaining about his close ties to Fosun, to Espirito Santo and to a handful of the players on the team’s roster. An investigation by the Football League, which is responsible for the three professional tiers of English soccer below the Premier League, found that there were no breaches in how Wolves — bolstered by a clutch of Mendes-linked players from Portugal — secured promotion to England’s top flight in 2018.
But Mendes’s dealings with the club, and others, run deep. Wolves — and Mendes — were also at the center of two curious trades this summer involving F.C. Porto, a Portuguese champion with a two-decade link to the agent.
On the cusp of a financial meltdown, and with large debts coming due, Porto turned to Mendes to find buyers for some of its up-and-coming stars. In a feat of alchemy that Mendes appears to have honed to perfection, Mendes convinced Fosun, his Chinese partners at Wolves, to pay what could be as much as $70 million for two highly rated though largely untested youngsters: Vitor Ferreira, a 20-year-old midfielder known as Vitinha, and Fábio Silva, an 18-year-old forward.
A quarter of the 40 million euro fee for Silva ended up in agents commissions, Porto announced, with most of it going to Mendes.
The size of Mendes’s commission for Silva was eye-catching, and considerably above the industry average, but not uncommon: Last year, when Mendes arranged the $138 million sale of the Benfica teenager João Felix to Atlético Madrid, he reportedly earned about $35 million in the deal.
Still, it was another sign that whatever measures soccer’s governing body, FIFA, imposes to try to curb the excesses of the transfer market, the most canny operators are always able to generate sky-high returns.
Porto, which is regulated on the Portuguese stock market, declined to explain why it had agreed to part with 25 percent of the sale price for Silva in commissions.
A spokeswoman for Mendes declined to comment on any of Mendes’s past or present deals, saying the agent never discusses his business publicly.
Portuguese agents have privately fumed about Mendes’s influence over the industry for years. Yet Mendes is so well-connected that clubs routinely call on him to grease the wheels of deals even when he is not affiliated with the player in question. In January, for example, he was paid $8 million for helping arrange for Braga, a mid-ranking Portuguese team, to sell its young forward Francisco Trincão to Barcelona. Trincão’s registered agents were not involved in the sale.
In 2018, the president of Benfica, Portugal’s biggest team, described Mendes’s role as akin to a taxi service, ferrying out the club’s best assets in one direction and ferrying in millions of dollars in the other.
Last week, Mendes helped Benfica replenish its accounts once again. Benfica agreed to send striker Carlos Vinicius on loan to Tottenham under an agreement in which the London team will have to pay 40 million euros to make the deal permanent next summer, and then it sold Dias, a talented defender, to Manchester City for a fee of 68 million euros (about $80 million).
Dias’s arrival at Manchester City was bad news for Nicolas Otamendi, since he plays the same position. But Mendes had a solution there, too: Otamendi was promptly sold to Benfica for $18 million, slotting neatly into the space Dias had vacated. Mendes, as Otamendi’s agent, cashed in again.
His ties with clubs and executives have at times allowed Mendes’s operation to seem like a carousel on which a never ending cast of athletes floats from one club to another. In collecting commissions each time, Mendes directs a system that sometimes seems as sophisticated, and as meticulously choreographed, as anything a coach might direct on the field.
Mendes rarely gives interviews, but he was required in 2017 to explain how his business operated at a court hearing in Spain, where the authorities charged a number of his clients, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Mourinho, with tax evasion. Most of the cases were resolved with guilty pleas and fines.
Mendes told the Spanish court he knew nothing about his clients’ tax arrangements, saying he had hired professionals to deal with those affairs. His focus, he said, was purely on guiding their careers.
“I dedicate myself only to this, trying to find the best solutions for my players, and spending a year is like spending a minute,” he said, according to news reports at the time. “I try to dedicate my time to my family and spend my life working, on the phone until midnight.”
This year, even when soccer ground to a halt, Mendes kept right on working. He remains the agent always ready with a solution, providing clubs can afford his fee.
Improving depth in all positions but 1 makes this a no nonsense 9/10 window in my opinion.
See you all in January.
See you all in January.