Soccer's biggest clubs prepare for expensive summer because change is the new normal
Success, or a lack thereof, doesn’t really matter. One way or another, there will be transfers this summer.
Lots of them.
Provided it doesn’t lose its final Bundesliga game of the season on Saturday, at home against a collapsing Eintracht Frankfurt, Bayern Munich will win its seventh straight German championship. This summer, however, a major overhaul of its squad awaits with a slew of veterans and underperformers moving on, and even title-winning manager Niko Kovac not entirely sure of his job.
FC Barcelona won an eighth La Liga title in 11 years and a fourth in five. A fifth straight Copa del Rey is still in play as well, with Barca favored against Valencia on May 25. But its team will likely get a major makeover during the summer. Its two most expensive signings ever, Philippe Coutinho and Ousmane Dembele, could both be gone before next season. Even though both of them have made a mere 50 or so appearances for the club, they might be offloaded at steep discounts. Word has it the signing of Atletico Madrid and France forward Antoine Griezmann has already been arranged.
Barca’s eternal rivals Real Madrid will look unrecognizable come August. Just a year removed from a third straight Champions League title – and a fourth in five years – the club has hired and fired two permanent managers, only to return to the original one, Zinedine Zidane. He now, for the first time, has the clout to shape his squad and intends to use it. Chelsea’s Eden Hazard seems to be on his way. Paris Saint-Germain’s Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, and Manchester United’s Paul Pogba, are rumored as possibilities to join him. Gareth Bale is sure to depart. Others will too. Maybe Toni Kroos. Yet the spine of the team is the same as the one that dominated Europe for half a decade, and only defender Sergio Ramos and playmaker Luka Modric are of an age that’s concerning – each man is 33. All the same, Real will be torn down and rebuilt.
With or without Pogba, United will throw yet more money at its many on-field problems. Never mind that the club has spent almost a billion – with a B – dollars on new players in half a decade. And it might do so with or without Ole Gunnar Solsjkaer, who was made the permanent manager on March 29, before United backslid to its moribund self late on in the season.
Arsenal? A Europa League final place this season. And likely lots of transfer activity.
Even Tottenham Hotspur, in the Champions League final for the first time in its existence, will probably spend piles of cash to beef up a thin squad in an attempt to keep manager Mauricio Pochettino around. And the only thing stopping Chelsea from finding more players to support Maurizio Sarri after a transitional year in which the Blues nevertheless finished third, should he even be retained, is a two-window transfer ban.
It all speaks to the endless remaking of the elite soccer teams, where everybody is always reloading. Only the very best teams of the past season might stand pat. Maybe. Manchester City and Liverpool, the standout teams across the major leagues, aren’t expected to do a whole lot. But even they are looking to shore up a position or two, in spite of enormous investment the last few transfer windows.
Perpetual flux is the status quo now. Turmoil is the new normal.
And as such, the offseason is now as important as the season itself, what with all those transfers. While the outcome of the season isn’t decided during the summer, exactly, it is very much possible to take yourself out of the running for trophies before the season even begins. Miss out on a few of the big gets of that window, the it-boys du jour, while your domestic rivals do load up, and a long and disappointing season likely awaits you.
That’s the mindset in the modern game: We’re all rich, so let’s throw money at even the smallest of problems, never mind the staggering inflation of transfer fees and salaries. There’s no more allowance for coaching, for growth, for painstakingly crafting and shaping a squad over the course of a few years. Had a disappointing season? Buy a new team. Sell everybody who underperformed even slightly. That’s what AC Milan did the last two summers, acquiring almost an entirely fresh starting lineup each time, only to go from sixth place to another sixth place to fifth place.
Yet the evidence suggests that the most successful teams right now are exactly the ones that were built over a longer period of time, with a manager allowed to craft something in his image, or to sharpen what he found in the locker room upon his hiring. City and Liverpool and Barca; Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain; Spurs and Bayern – all the winners of this last season, really – were constructed deliberately over the course of several seasons, not in a single transfer window.
Nonetheless, the almost universal instinct is to try to make up the gains quickly, with a few choice transfers that will surely put your team over the top but hardly ever does.
It’s buy or get left behind. Just ask Spurs, the European finalists who last bought a player on Jan. 31 of 2018.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Yahoo Sports soccer columnist and a sports communication lecturer at Marist College. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
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