Premier League Loans and Weak Ties
Premier League clubs (England’s top soccer competition) suffer from a problem unique to teams of their financial superiority. Soccer clubs in the world’s top leagues can buy and sell players in two major periods called transfer windows. In England, these transfer windows occur during the off-season in summer and in the middle of the season (January). Premier League clubs are some of the world’s most valuable franchises and thus have little trouble maintaining a steady influx of players from transfers and their youth academies. In fact, the Premier League’s inability to permanently offload its surplus of players benefits lower division clubs.
The English Football Association (FA) encourages loans, essentially borrowing a player for a limited period of time, to lower division clubs from the Premier League. An analysis of the transfer structure of English soccer clubs as a social network shows that Premier League clubs do in fact initiate the vast majority of loans, with a few lower division clubs in particular taking advantage of this system to replace injured players and fill gaps in their squads. The establishment of these weak ties was formalized by the creation of emergency loan windows outside of the standard transfer windows. Unfortunately, this system was abolished in 2015, forcing lower division clubs to import talents from foreign nations. Rather than decreasing the financial gap between teams in England, this measure further separates them and also leaves a significant group of players without a platform on which to obtain game experience and prove their potential.
http://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/10509644/emergency-loan-window-system-changes-explained
http://www.academia.edu/2046327/Football_Transfers_looked_from_a_social_network_analysis_perspective