It is deadline day in England but Spain’s transfer window has been shut since Friday night, leaving a frustrated David Moyes looking in from the outside as the deals are done. The Real Sociedad manager admits that he was disappointed at the club’s failure to sign anyone despite having considered signings a necessity and having identified a handful of clear targets, including “one or two from England”.
Moyes did not reveal which Premier League players he had pursued but Étienne Capoue and Joel Campbell were among them, and they had also looked into the possibility of bringing Asier Illarramendi back on loan from Real Madrid and tried to sign the AIK Solna winger Nabil Bahoui. Draft contracts had been presented to the Spanish League, the LFP, which even announced the signing on its website only for the deal not to go through after paperwork did not arrive in time for the Swedish club.
Two extra days may have been decisive, on the Bahoui deal at least. Instead, Spanish clubs could only sign up until Friday night. They can still sell to clubs in countries where the market remains open, raising the prospect of losing important players with no chance of replacing them. And on Saturday night Real Sociedad lost their top scorer Carlos Vela to a knee ligament injury during their 4-1 defeat at Real Madrid. He is expected to be out for around a month.
Although it was Moyes who identified the players to sign, the negotiations and mechanics of deals are handled by the club’s sporting director, Loren Juarros. Moyes had always anticipated the signings made now to be loan deals, with the more significant arrivals coming in the summer, but he considered their arrival to be important for the team and saw this month as an important test of the club’s resolve, support and efficiency. He described himself as “disappointed” at the failure to close any deals.
Moyes will continue to seek players for the summer, when he anticipates funds being made available by la Real. For now, though, he must see out the season with the same squad. La Real are 13th in La Liga, with survival the aim, although Moyes said he had seen positive signs, even in the aftermath of a 4-1 defeat at the Santiago Bernabéu. He praised the goalkeeper Sebastián Rulli, the young full-back Aritz Elustondo and the central midfielder Rubén Pardo, whom he described as having played so well “he could have been wearing a Real jersey”. “Pardo he was as good as anyone,” the Scot said.
“I’ve got to say, there are only 31 days in January [anyway] and Spain actually gives you less days, because we closed [on Friday] night,” Moyes said. “Of nearly all the transfers in January, a big percentage of them will be done on the last day. I don’t think that’s helped us. You can move people out of Spain but you can’t move people in. I could have probably done with an extra day in the end. And, obviously, if we had had a couple of days, knowing about Vela’s injury …
“In Italy, Germany and England [the deadline] is Monday evening. I think it’s because it’s a working day. Even if deals were going through [at the weekend], would they be processed then? Probably not, because there’s nobody working, because it’s not a working day. So I think what they’ve done [in England and elsewhere] is that people with common sense have looked at it and they’ve said: ‘We’ll give everyone the working day, it’s a short enough time anyway.’
“I’m not saying it would have made the difference or that it’s the reason we didn’t get our players but I think it might have just given me a little chance to do something else.
“[The president and Loren] have tried. They’ve pushed hard to try and get players in and I’m trying to get good quality players in. I’m trying to raise the standard. Sometimes you can’t get those players: either the clubs won’t let you or they choose not to come. But I want to try to raise the standard. We came here [to Real Madrid] knowing that it’d be incredibly tough to get a result and I think the players did everything they could. But I want to come here with a team which has got a chance of getting results.”
