Fulham transfer struggles perfectly illustrate growing issue for Premier League’s middle class

This summer there’s been a greater than usual number of Premier League managers openly complaining about their club’s inability to get enough transfer business done, even if most have been more sensibly diplomatic about it than Nuno Espirito Santo.

The Nottingham Forest boss, Everton’s David Moyes, Crystal Palace’s Oliver Glasner, Newcastle’s Eddie Howe and Fulham’s Marco Silva have all been outspoken about the issue – and the Cottagers make for a particularly interesting case study in the problem now facing a whole fleet of mid-table sides. Even Newcastle, a Champions League side, are struggling with it.

After year upon year of adding to the squad, Fulham have had an uncharacteristically quiet summer transfer window. There’s something almost delightfully Rothmans retro about a Premier League side’s only business being the £500,000 signing of a 34-year-old back-up goalkeeper from Montpellier; their only departures have been a handful of routine free agent releases and loans, mostly to the Championship.

Unlike some clubs, this seems to have nothing to do with Fulham taking a necessarily cautious approach due to the pressure of profit and sustainability rules; their position is reasonably strong compared with some other Premier League clubs.

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Rather, the issue facing clubs of their stature is one of pure supply and demand.

If you’re newly-promoted and just need upgrades on a Championship squad, or if you have had almost your whole defence poached like Bournemouth, finding players who are an improvement on what you already have is relatively straightforward. If you have wallets and reputations the size of Chelsea’s, Liverpool’s, Manchester City’s, Manchester United’s, Tottenham’s and Arsenal’s, then you can afford to spend very big money on the very best players.

But sides like Fulham are stuck in between. To establish yourself in mid-table security these days, on the whole your recruitment has to be incredibly well-optimised – especially with PSR in effect.

Brentford, Brighton, Bournemouth and Fulham haven’t got where they are over the past few years by just having a flyer on someone they think might be alright – but the huge money available to them compared with even some of the biggest teams in Europe’s other leagues means they have been able to sign players of a standard that would never have been available to them a decade ago.

The thing is that talented footballers are a finite resource – and six year into the TV money reaching truly astronomical levels, those who offer a substantial improvement on what the Premier League’s middle class already have is proving extremely difficult.

Those who would do so are now only affordable to the big boys, or are increasingly leaving the big clubs not to join the mid-table pack, but to ply their trade abroad where they are more likely to find a club that can compete for trophies: Scott McTominay, Marcus Rashford, Jarrell Quansah, Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, even Tyler bloody Morton. Thankfully for Fulham here, they had an exception to call on: Emile Smith Rowe, who signed from Arsenal last year.

It does not help those clubs’ managers that for the same reasons, you really have to stuff things up big time to find yourself drawn into a relegation battle with the three sides coming up from the Championship.

Chairmen and directors of football are now in a position where playing it safe and looking after their PSR position for the next transfer window is a far more sensible decision than spunking a load of cash on a punt and a hunch – especially when the same problem also affects the clubs immediately around you in the table.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends what you want from your football. Those supply problem means those who do manage to find gems at an affordable price will still be at an advantage. But it feels retrospectively inevitable that things would start to settle down at some point, and the Premier League, at least in mid-table, would return to being primarily about which clubs put their existing resources to best use.

For purists who are more interested in tactics, coaching and academy graduates than they are in being able to brag about having won the transfer window on social media, that might not be the worst thing; it makes the football much more about managerial battles of wits rather than who can use Wyscout most effectively.

The good news for those Fulham fans who are frustrated by their lack of transfer movement is that Marco Silva showed last year that he has grown to be a very savvy Premier League manager capable of getting results.

Here, his introduction of Smith Rowe from the bench came at the perfect moment, with Fulham applying increasing pressure in search of an equaliser and just needing that finishing touch in the box. Silva has made those kind of substitutions a specialty: they’ve scored 19 from the bench since the beginning of last season, the most of any top-flight club.

We’re not surprised by that stat at all. Fulham’s push towards the European qualification places last season was built on their shrewd manager making them extremely organised, disciplined and difficult to play against – traits they exhibited again in this game. The only (admittedly glaring) exceptions were in dealing with crosses, such as Calvin Bassey’s bizarre decision to turn into a judoka and hand the visitors a clear-cut penalty that Bruno Fernandes then blasted over the bar, and letting Leny Yoro rise unchallenged at a set piece to force the opener.

But it’s bad news for league table mobility, and the chances of a side like Fulham closing the gap on the long-established wealthy elite are minimal. To do that, they need to upgrade their attacking options from the serviceable-but-not-outstanding players they already have. It certainly would have made the difference here, with Fulham firmly on top after drawing back level but unable to find a winner.

Unfortunately, those kinds of players are the most problematic of all amid that supply and demand issue – two of the best from the middle reaches of the Premier League, Bryan Mbeumo and Mattheus Cunha, lined up against Fulham for Manchester United here.

That kind of complaint is nothing new; football has ever been thus. But that’s the problem with being fabulously wealthy: it doesn’t really matter if you’re ranking yourself against your even richer acquaintances.