Clubs, particularly in League One and below, have taken a big financial hit because of the covid crisis. And now they're faced with the annual problem of getting their squads together before the window closes, knowing that they need decent cover for every position on the pitch, at a time when money is tight for many.
Injuries can, and always have wreaked havoc, but wealthier clubs with bigger squads will always have a major advantage over those with less wealthy owners.
Is it time to tweak the system to level the playing field a little bit, or at least to reduce the element of luck a little bit?
Maybe each club should be allowed to make one or two transfers outside of the transfer windows each season, perhaps with the an exclusion for the last month of the season. All clubs would benefit by being at least slightly protected from freak injury crises, such as the one we suffered in the Championship.
I'm sure there are a ton of reasons why this idea can't and won't happen, but it would appear to make at least some sense to me.
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The problem is some clubs only sign 19/20 players and don't have an academy to speak of, and others sign 25 senior players and have a full academy to pick from too.
The only true solution would be an American style roster, with wage caps, and then the ability to place players on injured reserve etc and sign players short term from a practice squad (reserves) to play, but that's too complicated to do over a 4 league system with 92 clubs
Barcelona were granted an emergency exception to sign another striker from La Liga outside of the transfer window because of a long term injury to Dembele. They went and signed Martin Braithwaite from Leganes who at the time was their top scorer..........and Leganes weren't able to sign anyone to replace him.
Why couldn't a club of their size just use their world famous academy?
Clubs have from the end of the season (early May) to the end of August to bring in players. That's almost 4 months. Plenty of time. If you can't formulate a squad of 25 players during that time then you are doing something wrong.
I don't remember any good reason for it in the first place.