The January Transfer Window
January arrived with Lazio sitting unexpectedly close to the top of Serie A. Naturally, I reacted in the calm and measured manner one would expect from an experienced football manager: I immediately signed half a football team.
Now, in my defence, every signing made perfect sense in isolation. The problem only emerged when the finance department placed them all on the same spreadsheet. Alessandro Dellavalle arrived from Torino, Sebastián Boselli arrived from River Plate, Luca Lipani arrived from Sassuolo and Davide Calabria arrived to provide experience and depth. Federico Ravaglia was added because every successful football project eventually reaches the point where you start buying additional goalkeepers just in case. Then came Ilias Akhomach.
The fee was £21 million. Which sounds like a lot because, unfortunately, it is a lot. At the time I justified the expenditure by explaining that elite clubs require elite depth. The club accountant listened politely, nodded thoughtfully and then spent several minutes staring out of a nearby window. Looking back, that should probably have concerned me more than it did.
The encouraging thing was that the signings actually worked. This was highly inconvenient. Normally, when a manager conducts a transfer window of this magnitude, at least one player turns out to be completely useless. It provides balance. It reassures everyone that football remains fundamentally chaotic and that hubris will eventually be punished. Instead, the squad became stronger. Rotation became possible, injuries became survivable and, most alarmingly of all, the title challenge started to look real.
Unfortunately, the financial consequences also became real.
I have spent a season telling everyone that Lazio are a sleeping giant, the heart of Italian football, the rightful heirs to Verón, Nesta and Nedvěd. At some point during March I opened the club finances and discovered that Lazio’s overall balance had fallen below minus sixty million pounds. I stared at the screen for a while, hoping that further observation might somehow improve the situation. It did not. Eventually I closed the page and moved on with my day.