{"id":581,"date":"2008-09-02T19:26:14","date_gmt":"2008-09-02T18:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=581"},"modified":"2009-09-26T12:10:21","modified_gmt":"2009-09-26T11:10:21","slug":"transfer-and-trading-deadlines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=581","title":{"rendered":"Transfer and Trading deadlines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many football fans were repeatedly pressing their F5 key last night, hoping to find exciting news of rampant transfer rumours turning into actual transactions<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 As long-touted deals were finally completed, as well as deals that seemed to come out of nowhere at the last moment, the transfer window shut at midnight with the promise of drama and excitement being completely fulfilled.\u00c2\u00a0 Somehow, the MLB trading deadline never seems to work out that way.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We did at least have the Manny Ramirez trade<\/a> to set the tongues wagging this year, but generally the deadline is an anti-climax.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course, in baseball there isn’t really a firm deadline: teams can still add players after 31 July if they pass through waivers.\u00c2\u00a0 That takes a bit of the drama away in comparison to the Premiership (Football League teams can continue to sign loan players from a week after the deadline has passed).\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps more importantly, baseball provides a trading<\/em> deadline rather than a transfer<\/em> deadline.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s still a certain amount of brinkmanship when finalizing a trade, but throwing large sums of cold hard cash into the equation makes things that much more complicated.\u00c2\u00a0 More deals may be left up in the air\u00c2\u00a0ahead of the deadline as a result.\u00c2\u00a0 Or perhaps it makes it simpler?\u00c2\u00a0 It seems that some teams can always find an extra million or so to complete a deal once the deadline is looming, whereas deciding to part with a higher quality prospect (or two) is a more difficult call to make.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

What’s more, footballers have a huge advantage over their baseball counterparts when it comes to player power.\u00c2\u00a0 Dimitar Berbatov wanted to join Man Utd and therefore he put Spurs into a position where they had little choice but to sell.\u00c2\u00a0 The same can be said for Robinho, although his grand plan came a little unstuck when he backed himself into a corner with Real Madrid and ended up basically having to accept a move to Man City (a team he probably had barely heard of prior to yesterday).\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, ballplayers can enjoy the benefits of free agency more readily, but they have to give up a lot of ground earlier in their careers to enjoy such a privilege.<\/p>\n

So, there are several reasons why football’s transfer deadline can produce more action than MLB’s trading deadline.\u00c2\u00a0 This begs the question why the Premier League doesn’t follow MLB’s practice of putting the deadline at a more reasonable hour, rather than waiting until midnight?\u00c2\u00a0 MLB’s deadline this year was 04.00 pm eastern (01.00 pm pacific), meaning that any dramatic deals could be promoted to maximum effect.\u00c2\u00a0 How many people bothered to stay up until the small hours to see whether one already rich footballer had moved to a rich football club?\u00c2\u00a0 If memory serves me correctly, the football transfer deadline used to be set for 17.00, which from a publicity standpoint makes much more sense.\u00c2\u00a0 20.00 would probably be ideal, using the deadline as a big prime time TV event allowing even casual football fans to enjoy the action as it unfolds and giving reporters plenty of time to write comprehensive stories for the early editions of their newspapers the following morning.<\/p>\n

Football could learn something from baseball here and, considering the growing American influence in the English game, maybe they will take it on board?\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Or maybe football would be too proud for that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many football fans were repeatedly pressing their F5 key last night, hoping to find exciting news of rampant transfer rumours turning into actual transactions.\u00c2\u00a0 As long-touted deals were finally completed, as well as deals that seemed to come out of nowhere at the last moment, the transfer window shut at midnight with the promise of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4716,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions\/4716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}