By the time today’s deadline is done, we will have seen more than £1bn spent across the 2025-26 summer and winter windows by English clubs alone, mostly in the top division. It is an extraordinary amount of money, but football today is big business.
Over my 30 years of management, I have witnessed many changes to the system, with the biggest being when windows were brought in, in 2002. Before then, you could buy and sell players whenever you liked throughout the season, until a deadline at the end of March.
When that change happened, Football League clubs were still allowed to make loan signings during certain periods after the windows had shut. Again, these could have a big impact.
When Stoke were battling against relegation from the Championship in March 2003, we brought in striker Ade Akinbiyi on loan from Crystal Palace and goalkeeper Mark Crossley from Middlesbrough.
They both had a tremendous impact, with their personality as well as their performances, and we ended up staying up on the last day of the season thanks to a 1-0 win over Reading, with Ade scoring our goal.
A few years later, again when I was at Stoke, we came across a loophole in the window system, about players in the Premier League who were left out of the nominated 25-man first-team squad that were registered to play in the league following that specific window.
Those players would be allowed to be loaned out, from a week after the window had closed.
John Rudge was at Stoke with me, as our director of sport, and was a wily old fox.
As I mentioned about my coaching staff in last week’s column about Michael Carrick, I always preferred an experienced head alongside me and there was no-one older and wiser than John around. I asked him to compile a list of those players who could help us.
The 2006-07 season did not start too well, and I was being criticised by some supporters about how the club had been so quiet during the summer transfer window – even my own chief executive questioned my ability to bring players in too!
The window closed but then the emergency window opened and in September, October and November of that year, we brought in Patrik Berger and Lee Hendrie from Aston Villa and Salif Diao of Liverpool, all on loan and with the parent clubs paying the majority of the players’ wages.
That season we missed out on the top-six in the Championship and a play-off place after drawing at QPR on the final day, but the momentum we built up then was maintained the following year when the club reached the Premier League for the first time in its history.
If I’d not made any of those signings, I don’t think the club would have made it into the top flight.
