Why the January market is structurally broken
The core problem is negotiating power, and it runs in the wrong direction for buyers. A club under no pressure to sell has no reason to negotiate mid-season, when losing a player disrupts a settled squad, so the players who do become available in January are disproportionately those a selling club is happy to lose, injury-prone squad members, players already unsettled, or names a relegation-threatened club is desperate to offload for any fee. Meanwhile the buyers most active in January are frequently clubs in crisis themselves, chasing a specific position gap or fighting relegation, which is exactly the situation in which a recruitment department is least equipped to negotiate patiently.
The CIES Football Observatory's overpay analysis, built from around 1,500 fee-paying transfers, has repeatedly flagged January outliers. In one widely cited example, forward Jackson Martinez was rated as the most overpaid transfer in Europe at the time, sold for 42 million euros against an estimated statistical value of 18.2 million euros, a gap CIES attributed largely to the seller's stronger negotiating position in a thin market rather than any collapse in the player's underlying numbers.
