Welcome to the Planet Football Podcast. I'm Grant Wall and we've got one of our favorite regular guests on today to talk

mainly about the end of the transfer window over in Europe. He's Dan Altman the

founder of North Yard Analytics and one of the world's leading voices on soccer analytics.

Dan, thanks for joining us again.

Thanks for having me again, Grant. Always a pleasure.

Transfer window, about to close shut moves have happened some will still happen and we're

going to talk about just kind of different things about this transfer window and the transfer window in general.

It's to me a fascinating topic and I think we're learning about it more and more as time goes on.

You obviously look at it from an analytics perspective and I just

wanted to start I guess by asking in general terms what are some of the do's and don'ts of the transfer

window whether it's when and how to do business

what to watch for anything else like that? Well I think one of the don'ts that we see

a lot is teams waiting till the very last minute and then essentially getting stuck in a hold up problem where someone has them over a barrel and they can demand whatever price that they want because the team has to bring in a player to fill a position or because the fans

are expecting something and there will be cries for the heads of various team officials if they

don't bring someone in. Those are situations where you end up overpaying.

And overpaying is a big issue this season, especially in England,

because everybody knows there's a lot more TV money floating around

with the new UK TV deal that they have there.

And so every team will be like teams like Chelsea and Manchester United used to complain about where if you know the identity of the

buyer the price goes up two or three times.

But some of the dues I think are things that we're starting to see in this window, teams that do their business early, try and get it out of the way.

Not only does that mean you're less likely to overpay, but it also means that you show other players whom you might want to recruit that you're serious and you're getting good people

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