The transfer deadline for Premier League clubs arrives on Thursday and given the shortened space for completing deals, a "late flurry of moves is expected to dominate the build-up to the new season," according to Simon Evans of REUTERS. Premier League clubs voted last year to ensure the window, which had closed at the end of August, is closed before the action on the field begins, "but you would hardly know it from the relatively small amount of deals done." ManU and Leicester City kick off the new campaign at Old Trafford on Friday and in the coming days, "club officials will be frantically seeking to complete the paperwork on transfers and contracts and complete due diligence such as medical tests." The fact that the new system was introduced in a World Cup year "made the concentration of business in the final week even more likely," given leading players were in Russia for a month. The DRN agency's Nick Cassidy said, "It has been a strange window. No one has known what to expect with the earlier deadline. We expected after the World Cup things would speed up, but it hasn't." It is unlikely that the final few days of the market will include a "massive game-changing transfer," however, and the indications are that most of the deals will be clubs "seeking to trim their squads down to size by off-loading, in many cases by loan deals, fringe members of their squad" (REUTERS, 8/6).
