You’ve made the effort, you’ve changed so far as to be unrecogniseable, but after two years of trying, do you simply give up? Premier League clubs certainly feel that way this week as they have voted to put the summer transfer window back to how it was up to 2017, ending at the very end of August or on the 1st of September.

For years, fans banged the drum for the transfer window not to interrupt the start of the Premier League season. Why should a player be able to transfer, they reasoned, when they’ve played for another team already that season? It made perfect sense. A new future was born, one where clubs would start the season knowing they could make no changes to their squads until January.

So, what changed?

The Premier League may be a trendsetter in many ways as far as football goes, and it clearly has the ear of FIFA, but other European leagues didn’t follow suit. The Bundesliga, La Liga, Ligue 1 and Serie A clubs could all still trade until the end of August, meaning that Premier League clubs were forced into the tricky situation that they could close all their incoming business but then lose a player abroad without being able to replace them.