Monaco CEO Thiago Scuro put it better than anyone else would: "Everybody in the football industry is fair and nice, just Monaco is not. Too much." He was being sarcastic, but he was also right.
The collapse of Chelsea's €54 million move for Lamine Camara and Everton's failed pursuit of Folarin Balogun in the final hours of the summer window caused genuine fury inside both Premier League clubs. Sources at Chelsea accused Monaco of reneging on a deal agreed hours earlier. Everton were unhappy with both Monaco's conduct and Balogun's decision to walk away after spending most of deadline day at the club's training ground — a decision that became easier when Everton started quietly exploring Joshua Zirkzee and Tammy Abraham as alternatives while simultaneously trying to renegotiate Monaco's payment terms.
Hard to blame the player for that one.
This is how the transfer market actually works
The "Wild West" description didn't start this week. Ivan Gazidis used it when he joined Arsenal from MLS in 2009. John W Henry said the same thing after buying Liverpool in 2010. Todd Boehly expressed his shock at football's "freestyling" business practices in 2022 — his first year owning Chelsea. American sports executives keep arriving in Europe expecting structure and finding a market where a handshake agreement can evaporate six hours before a deadline.
What makes this week's drama particularly rich is Chelsea's response. The club made great play of how professional they'd been in approving the €125 million Enzo Fernandez sale to Manchester City — even after their own Camara deal had collapsed. Admirable. This is also the same Chelsea that PSG officials called a "class A circus" in January 2023 when paperwork for Hakim Ziyech's loan move wasn't completed in time. And on that same deadline day, a separate loan move for Omari Hutchinson to West Brom also fell through. When you're spinning that many plates, some hit the floor.
The Fernandez situation is its own kind of embarrassing. Chelsea knew last spring that he wanted to leave. They spent the summer without a replacement plan that held together. A self-imposed 5pm August 14 deadline for City to submit an offer came and went, ignored — because everyone knew Chelsea would sell if the price was right. They did. Then Camara fell through. They end the window without a midfielder and without much standing to lecture anyone about professionalism.
The real victims here
Everton manager David Moyes deserves genuine sympathy. He spent much of last season publicly lamenting his lack of attacking options, only to sell Beto to Fiorentina on deadline day on the assumption the Balogun deal was done — then watch it fall apart hours later. He's left with Thierno Barry as his only senior centre-forward. That's a serious problem for a club already fighting at the wrong end of the Premier League table, and it makes Everton's attacking markets considerably harder to back with any confidence.
The club's Fan Advisory Board nailed it: "a predictable last-minute scramble to fix long-standing squad weaknesses that have been evident for years." That's not just frustration — it's an accurate description of how both Chelsea and Everton approached this window.
Last year, Liverpool lost a Marc Guehi deal at the deadline when Crystal Palace pulled out because Oliver Glasner hadn't secured a replacement. 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 missed the deadline. De Gea never got to Madrid. He's at Fiorentina now. Nobody learned anything.
The only guaranteed way to avoid deadline day chaos is to get deals done early. And the only guaranteed way to do that is to make an offer the other side can't sit on. Neither Chelsea nor Everton did that. Monaco knew it. Balogun's camp knew it. The clock ran out.
Scuro's parting line says everything: "There is no reason that this kind of discussion on the last day of the transfer window makes Monaco the bad guys in the room." Whether or not you agree, he's describing a market where that argument is entirely coherent — and that's the problem nobody has solved in 15 years of complaining about it.
