The busiest week of the year for football writers comes before a ball has been kicked

The nature of the week means immediately there’s a detail from a transfer saga you’re sent that demands checking. That will itself warrant writing up… before there’s another. And another. And another

It is that very rare time in the football calendar, where nothing is played and everything is thereby equal, so everyone can enjoy that rare allowance of hope, of excitement… well, everyone except one strand of the wider football community.

Football journalists can’t really feel that hope or excitement, but not because the nature of the job has deadened them to any emotion. It’s because they don’t have the time. And it is specifically because of a change of time.

There have been many arguments against moving the English transfer deadline to the eve of the Premier League season, but the most passionate would probably be made by journalists, and about journalism itself.

It effectively makes this a quadruple week.

Consider it. This is already one of the busier weeks of the season because it is not a normal week. The launch of a new season warrants a lot of preview work, and shaping of predictions. There are the campaigns of 20 clubs to be forecast, and so much to be analysed. Put bluntly, football journalists will have a list of articles they have to do for just before the season, amping up the usual demands of the job.

And on top of that they’ve thrown in the busiest week of the season, full stop.

That is what the last week of the transfer window will always be. It’s not just that it’s going to be busy because clubs are busy… it’s that it’s genuinely 24-7, with breaking updates coming out of nowhere.

This has a huge effect on a practical level. Take, for example, the Monday before the window closed. The plan was to get writing a large preview piece on the Premier League early morning, and just keep things ticking over with transfers while writing, regularly checking in. Well, that was the theory. It never works out like that in practice.

The nature of the week means immediately there’s a detail from a transfer saga you’re sent that demands checking. That will itself warrant writing up… before there’s another. And another. And another.

Before you know it you’ve written nothing other than a series of updates, and multiple WhatsApp messages, to all manner of contacts.

It’s all the more hectic because the intensity of transfer chasing necessitates a totally different work mindset to the more thoughtful reflection preview work requires. You’re going from the state of a deal to the state of a game… eventually.

This of course isn’t to complain about the nature of the work. This is precisely why we’re in it. This is what we enjoy.

It’d just be nice if we got to enjoy it all in separate weeks… and got a moment to relish some of that excitement. Oh no, here’s the phone again...

Yours,

Miguel Delaney

Chief football writer