Premier League: 10 Biggest Transfer Window Mistakes

The January transfer window presents every team with the opportunity to improve their squad for the battles ahead and offload those players that aren't good enough. A club may cash in on a player to help balance the books or use the funds to strengthen available squad options (or not in the case of Newcastle United,) and they may also fork out a hefty sum of money in order to bring in a player they believe will become their saving grace (see United, Manchester.) It's common in football that mistakes will be made and the mid-season transfer window is no different, arguably offering the biggest opportunity for mistakes, given the perfect storm of desperation, an inflated market and vast sums of money being thrown around. Clubs can be desperate and it can show, though sometimes even the greatest signing can prove to be a flop - as Chelsea have found to their eternal detriment with Torres and Shevchenko. Of course, these mistakes will also be made during the Summer but there is a much higher possibility for error at the beginning of the year, and the results are often cause for greater scrutiny because of the false inflation of fees. While the window is open for a month the business only really gets going in the last week, with the final few days being extremely chaotic, and that is not the smartest foundation for good decisions to be made. The window just gone was no different and despite not throwing up as many big moves as some - including Jim White, no doubt - would have hoped, there was still a lot to talk about, including a number of glaring mistakes that should definitely have been avoided, and which will have repercussions for the clubs who made them in the next few months. What follows here is a ranking of the worst of those decisions...
Contributor
Contributor

Josh has had work featured in the Evening Gazette and on Newcastle United website. He is a Multimedia Journalism student at Teesside University and runs a successful sports blog. He also enjoys films, comics and TV, writing about anything he can. Josh has recently started writing his first of what he hopes will be many books.