Premier League agree to close summer transfer window before season starts – reports
According to reports, the Premier League has agreed to close next summer’s transfer window before the season starts.
It has been reported that executives from clubs in Europe’s top five leagues are keen to stop transfers after the season has started.
As things stand, the 2025/26 campaign will kick off on August 16 and if this rule comes into effect, the 2025 transfer window will close 25 hours earlier on Friday, August 15.
This is all according to a report from talkSPORT, the Premier League want the rest of Europe to ‘follow suit’ after ‘the idea of a uniformed deadline day collapsed this summer when La Liga withdrew’.
This was due to the Spanish league ‘coming under pressure from Barcelona’ as they needed to raise funds through player sales to register Dani Olmo.
TRANSFER FEATURES FROM F365
👉 Premier League five-year net spend table: Chelsea miles clear of Man Utd; Man City bottom half
👉 Twenty biggest transfers in the world in 2024 summer transfer window
While Barcelona benefitted, plenty of clubs did not. Smaller clubs always seem to lose star players after the season has started, completely curtailing their plans for the entire campaign.
It is claimed in the report:
Executives from the European Club Association, which represents clubs from England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France, are all committed to stopping clubs from trading players after the new campaign has started.
Clubs could buy and sell players until August 30 – two weeks after the Premier League got underway.
That arrangement was a huge topic of frustration for managers in the Premier League who weren’t happy at the unsettling nature the market had on their preparations.
The European Club Association has Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano and Celtic’s non-executive chairman Peter Lawwell on the board of directors alongside former Sunderland director Chris Woerts.
A ‘prominent figure in the Dutch Eredivisie’, Woerts has spoke about how the plan to close the summer window before the season kicks off has grown support.
“The clubs are working hard to get the decision made on this within the entire ECA,” Woerts said.
“Next year the transfer window must close on August 15, before the leagues kick off.
“Everyone is getting frustrated and annoyed by the fact that players are still being sold for weeks while the competitions have started.
“One major club in Spain caused a problem so it couldn’t happen this year. That was FC Barcelona. Because of all their financial problems they were not able to make moves on the transfer market until a very late stage. So they broke the pact of the ‘Big Five’.”
There were some big deals on deadline day this summer, including Manuel Ugarte’s transfer from Paris Saint-Germain to Manchester United.
👉 MORE: Premier League winners and losers | Who will be the next Man Utd manager?