Financial Fair Play Ruining ‘Sky Sports News Day’?

Aside from last summer, the close of the transfer window has represented nothing more than a day of jealousy for Arsenal fans.

How many of you watched Santa Claus: The Movie this Christmas?

You remember the scene where little Joe is wandering the cold streets of New York, freezing, homeless and hungry. He sees a branch of McDonalds, and with pains in his stomach he presses his little face up against the window, looking in with envy as he wishes with all his heart that he could be in there enjoying the festivities with everyone else?

Well that`s how Arsenal fans feel at the close of 99% of transfer windows.

At least that was the case until now.

In the summer we got to sample a taste of the joy of having a busy day with the manager brining a succession of great players for us to drool over at least for a few days and wonder how they`ll fit into the side and what qualities they will bring.

Fast forward to the New Years transfer window, and once again Gunners fans are left not in the least bit jealous. This time however for some completely different reasons.

It appears as though a mix of the financial fair play rules, the home grown player rule and the entire global economic downturn is rendering “Sky Sports News Day” a complete joke. And for that we must be truly thankful.

Most Arsenal fans were pretty certain that we wouldn`t see any players of real note coming in yesterday, not least because our 25 man squad currently has no room for any non-home-grown player over the age of 21. That said Mr Wenger still brought in a young player who in typical Arsene fashion none of us known anything about.

However when you look around the other clubs, clubs who traditionally spend obscene amounts of money every time the window is so much as left ajar, there was little to no action amongst even those.

So are the rules actually working?

Time will tell. However if the implementation of these rule do nothing other than make Jim White look like a complete bell-end trying to over-hype a short term signing of Louis Saha or the render useless the rather large face of Brian Swanson fannying around with his touch screen TVs trying to impress us with the massive total of money spent in this years transfer window (£55M combined for those who care), then it`s a job well done in my opinion.