The winter transfer market session has closed. What happened? Practically nothing, even though everything was told for a month.
Cancelo, Perisic, Diaby, Jones (Curtis, not Indiana), Icardi, Kolo Muani, En-Nesyri, Mateta I and Mateta II (always him, not two brothers), Zirkzee for many, Raspadori for some and Romagnoli for the sheikh. The Transfer Market 2026 Winter Edition is nice, but I wouldn’t live there.
A month of packages and counter-packages in which the most important coup in the end was that of Milan who surprisingly, given the conditions, bought Maignan back, avoiding the mockery of the free transfer. All the others, or almost everyone, have made a point, not without some bad impressions dispensed around Europe.
Apart from Roma, who amended their summer omissions to avoid Gasperini’s umpteenth outpouring of bile, they all behaved more or less like De Laurentiis. Except that he, by transferring Pirandello to the small things of the transfer market, had obtained the “zero balance transfer” license in time, protecting himself from Conte’s wrath. Indeed, the paradox is that those who couldn’t have done something and not necessarily with the formula of bread, loan and imagination.
It was a disappointing market: zero money and very few ideas. Some change was put on youngsters to be sent to the B teams and transformed into capital gains in a couple of years, a mechanism that is popular with American funds and beyond. Seriously, perhaps only Roma among the teams at the top of the table emerges strengthened having added Malen and Zaragoza. Atalanta drew a draw: Raspadori in, Lookman out.
The others pretended. Maximum solidarity with those who have had to recount weeks of cosmic nothingness or almost nothing with some hint of involuntary humor. It’s also a hug to the managers who showed up at the 100 euro restaurant with a badly priced deca in their pocket. We are these and nothing else.
It may be that many of the attempted and failed shots actually served no purpose. In May we will know, when many will celebrate the narrow escape (of having to spend) and some will shed bitter tears having been left out of the premiums.
Making report cards is a useless exercise. Generally speaking, it wasn’t a nice scene to see the Old Lady get a double in spades like any fifteen year old, nor to witness a new chapter in the saga of medical visits (why always at the last one? Ah, to know…), or to observe Marotta and Ausilio refining their mime technique: what happened to the 40 million ready for use in the summer and forcibly saved for the winter?
If there’s one thing that entertained us, a lot, it was imagining Spalletti and Icardi in the same locker room again, even just for a few hours: stuff that could make a Netflix series out of it. Or discover the existence of the expanded labor cost parameter – a country of saints, poets and web accountants – and record that in the end everyone is happy, everyone has won or at most held on. A bit like the old and reassuring Christian Democracy of the 1980s at every election, except that here we talked more humbly about the transfer market and the summary is that we were bored to death.
