Last year, only £30 million was spent by Premier League clubs in the January transfer window. Some people, like Deloitte, even went as far to say that the culture of big Premier League spending was over. How wrong they were. Last Monday, Andy Carroll was sold to Liverpool for £35 million whilst Fernando Torres went down south to Chelsea for a rather astounding £50 million. Those two deals alone amount to nearly three times the amount spent overall in the January transfer window the year before.
They weren’t the only big-money transfers this past month. Darren Bent went to Aston Villa to save their season for a reported cost of somewhere between £18-24 million. Luis Suárez joined Liverpool for £23 million. Edin Dzeko went to Manchester City for £27 million. You sort of dread to think how much was spent by all twenty Premier League clubs in total.
However, of all the teams that have much to lose, it’s surely Liverpool. When this season, or possibly even the season after, concludes, people will look back to the 31st January 2011 as either the date that Liverpool managed to revive their flagging fortunes or the date that they dug yet another hole for themselves. With the departure of an out-of-sorts Torres (compared to past seasons anyway), it’s hoped that Carroll and Suárez will give them a much needed boost up front. Suárez, whilst not at his forty-nine-goals-in-a-season best, seems like a good purchase for them. Carroll, on the other hand, has much to prove. He may have had a great start to life in the Premier League with eleven goals already but does just eleven in top-flight football justify such an enormous price tag?
Well, for starters, he needs to perform at Liverpool. He needs to continue to challenge Berbatov for the Premier League top scorer spot for the rest of this season and continue that form onto the first half of the following season. He also needs to start turning it on for England. If he turns into a valuable asset for Capello then it’ll go some way to making the fee make sense. It’s a lot of work for him to do.
Even if he does achieve all of the above, then it’s hard to defend a valuation of £35 million for a player that has a criminal record – namely his conviction for common assault last year. Excuse me for making the comparison that everyone else is making but David Villa is worth a million pounds less and his record far outshines that of Carroll. The fact that we’re at a stage where a relative newcomer to top-flight football can instantly command so much money that it starts to question the value of money is astonishing. It seems like business sense comes second to continually rising your offer until you can finally have your damned player.
