Monaco CEO Thiago Scuro put it best: "Everybody in the football industry is fair and nice, just Monaco is not. Too much." He had a point. Chelsea and Everton spent the hours after Tuesday's transfer deadline leaking frustration to journalists, pointing fingers at Monaco and Folarin Balogun — and getting very little sympathy in return.
Chelsea claim Monaco reneged on a €54million agreement for Lamine Camara just hours after it was struck. Everton say Monaco and Balogun both behaved badly after the USMNT forward pulled out late, having spent most of the day at their training ground. Both clubs stopped short of formal statements but were happy to let their anger travel through back channels.
Here's the problem: this is the transfer market. It has always been this. Ivan Gazidis called it the "Wild West" when he joined Arsenal from MLS in 2009. John W Henry used the same phrase after buying Liverpool in 2010. Todd Boehly was still expressing shock at football's "freestyling" business practices in 2022 — by which point he'd already bought Chelsea. The label keeps getting applied because it keeps being accurate.
Balogun's late U-turn wasn't as simple as it looked
The details around Balogun's withdrawal tell a messier story than "player gets cold feet." After his medical, Everton went quiet — scrambling to explore alternatives including Manchester United's Joshua Zirkzee and Aston Villa's Tammy Abraham, while simultaneously trying to renegotiate payment terms with Monaco. Balogun was left waiting. When Everton eventually came back and said they were ready to proceed, he'd seen enough.
David Moyes ends the window with Thierno Barry as his only senior centre-forward, after Beto was sold to Fiorentina on the assumption the Balogun deal was done. Everton's Fan Advisory Board described it as a "predictable last-minute scramble to fix long-standing squad weaknesses that have been evident for years." That's not an overreaction — that's an accurate summary of how this club has operated for too long. Those attacking odds aren't improving anytime soon.
Chelsea's situation is harder to defend, partly because of the scale of the failure. They knew all summer that Enzo Fernandez wanted to leave. They gave Manchester City a deadline of August 14 to submit an offer — a deadline City ignored, correctly predicting Chelsea would sell anyway once the right fee arrived. The €125m deal eventually went through on deadline day, after Chelsea had already failed to land Camara as a replacement. They ended the window without addressing a gap they saw coming in May.
Deadline day collapses are a feature, not a bug
The history here is long. Liverpool were furious last summer when Crystal Palace accepted their £35m bid for Marc Guehi, then pulled the deal at Oliver Glasner's insistence — only for Guehi to join Manchester City in January anyway. In 2015, Real Madrid and Manchester United spent an entire summer in a stand-off over David de Gea, left themselves hours to complete the paperwork, and watched the deal collapse. De Gea never got his move. He's now at Fiorentina.
Chelsea themselves were called a "class A circus" by PSG officials in January 2023 after the Hakim Ziyech loan documentation wasn't completed in time. The same window, they failed to complete an Omari Hutchinson loan to West Brom. On Tuesday, they took the moral high ground about rubber-stamping the Fernandez sale because it was "the right and professional thing to do." The same club. Different day.
- Chelsea failed to replace Fernandez despite knowing since last season he wanted out
- Everton sold Beto before the Balogun deal was confirmed — a significant misjudgement
- Monaco exercised their right to walk away, which is exactly what every club does when it suits them
- The De Gea deal in 2015 collapsed because two of the world's biggest clubs left the paperwork too late
The only real protection against deadline day chaos is not being in deadline day situations. Get the deal done early. Pay what it takes early. The clubs that avoided the carnage this window are the ones who moved in June and July. The clubs that didn't are now explaining themselves through anonymous briefings — and blaming someone else for a problem of their own making.
"There are no rules," Scuro essentially said. "Welcome to football." He wasn't wrong.
