The EFL Transfer Window is OPEN + 10 Done Deals

Through January, NTT20.COM will cover every EFL signing in the Done Deals bulletin, delivered direct to your inbox every Tuesday and Friday morning.

Welcome, one and all, to NTT20.com’s January Transfer Window coverage. It starts here, ends with a Deadline Day bonanza on Monday 3rd February, and in between we’ll be analysing every single signing made across the Championship, League One and League Two. It’s a service you literally cannot get anywhere else.

What can paid subscribers expect? Simple: a twice-weekly bulletin on each and every transfer to an EFL club, landing in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays. For an example of how that looks, scroll on down (or preferably read what comes first), because we’ve given you the lowdown on 10 signings that went through today, having been arranged in advance with the players queuing patiently ever since for the window to open. 

First, though, let’s take a look at the impact that a January signing can make, because last season produced some positive examples.

We saw EFL clubs get creative with their scouting and recruitment in 2024, a trend that GBE expert Andy Watson predicted on NTT20.com in September 2023 and then analysed in October 2024. That was at its clearest in the summer, when players arrived from leagues in 34 different countries to try their hand at the Championship, League One or League Two. In the previous January window, though, we had a taste of what was to come. 

In the second tier, Coventry (with Victor Torp), Stoke (Million Manhoef) and Sunderland (Romaine Mundle) were rewarded for recruiting from the top divisions in Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium respectively, while Birmingham brought in Paik Seung-ho from South Korea’s Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors. Most intriguing, though, were transfers lower down the pyramid. The League of Ireland took a battering and will do so again, thanks to the success of last January’s arrivals as well as it being the close season there, and several EFL clubs looked even further abroad.

I know it isn’t a competition (it is a competition) but king of the imports, surely, was Alassana Jatta. Signings from overseas were meant to be the preserve of the Premier League and Championship, but fourth-tier Notts County, barely six months into their return to the Football League, bought Jatta from Viborg for a reported six-figure fee – less random than it sounds, given that County’s owners have a majority share in Viborg, but nonetheless bold. They let him study the mystical goalscoring ways of Macaulay Langstaff before unleashing the 25-year-old properly this season, and the Gambian ended 2024 with 19 goals in the equivalent of 23.4 all-competition 90s. That is unbelievable recruitment.

But Crawley Town provided my personal favourite. Last January, sat 12th in League Two, they signed Jeremy Kelly from the USA, where he’d just been playing in the second tier for Memphis 901 and then spent four whole weeks at FC Tulsa before swapping Oklahoma for West Sussex. Capable of playing in several positions, he was a revelation at left-wing-back as Crawley won a preposterous promotion and has since been vital in central midfield. Kelly is almost certainly Crawley’s best player now – helped by all of the others having left last summer – and he will either help to keep them in League One or bring in a decent chunk of money to replace whatever’s been lost in depreciating NFTs and magic beans. 

Less adventurous but no less smart were the teams looking into non-league, because a lot of players made the step up in January and haven’t looked back since. Richard Kone is the obvious example: he jumped six divisions to join Wycombe and soon found himself battling with Louie Barry and Jay Stansfield for the League One Golden Boot. However, Jamie Jellis (Tamworth to Walsall), Millenic Alli (Halifax to Exeter) and Jordan Thomas (Bath City to Cheltenham) have shown that Kone isn’t a one-off. Indeed, we recently tipped up Jellis and Thomas for another move this month.

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And, of course, players signed from within the Football League pyramid are still as important as ever, from Finn Azaz and Ephron Mason-Clark in the Championship to Denver Hume and Remeao Hutton in League Two. Several key January loanees subsequently made their deals permanent, too, including Millwall’s Japhet Tanganga and Derby’s Ebou Adams.

That’s a good 15 to 20 players listed there, with plenty more I could mention, and they were all January signings – all signings from just one January, in fact. Are we seeing an end to the received wisdom that winter window shopping is a bad idea? That’s a bit hasty, Davies, but widening the scouting scope does seem to have given clubs more opportunity to find a belter; something bespoke, something notonthehighstreet.com rather than from the nearest megamarket sale.

Perhaps the January transfer window can shake its reputation of being the last refuge of the desperate and instead be seen as a bona fide way to improve your squad, in the short, medium and long term. We’ll see. For now, a whole load of clubs are getting in on the act early – and again, they’ve been looking across the waves.

Championship