It's a natural fit for the elite level clubs, especially as squads have to be named by certain deadlines for the Champions League anyway; although presumably this policy would vanish if the window was done away with.

But at this level - is it really that necessary? Especially as most clubs don't have transfer funds these days anyway. Of the hundreds of transfers over the English close season, only a handful saw a League Two club pay money for a player, and even that statistic was skewed by the wheeler-dealings up at Notts County.

Of course, there were plenty of deals for which the transfer fee was undisclosed, but this could be a friendly and a bag of balls as much as it could any hard currency.

The vast majority, though, fell into the category of unattached. That is, players without a club who were fortunate enough to get pick up somewhere else.

And here's where the transfer window starts to become worthwhile for lower-league clubs.

If you haven't got any money to spend then your market becomes these players, and if that is the case then it doesn't matter if there's a transfer window or not.

What it does, though, is facilitate a second chance for these players, whose options would be limited if clubs had to option of taking over the contracts of players already registered elsewhere.

The transfer window has widely been heralded as a means of sharpening a manager's focus, putting the onus on him to get it right when he recruits, and then mould from there. Play the cards he has dealt himself, if you like.

What is happening at the Cobblers at the moment is that Ian Sampson is playing the cards dealt him by his predecessor, with his only avenue for changing his squad being to look at the unattached market.

A quick scan of the PFA website tells us there are more than 75 players available to a loving manager for the princely sum of nothing at all.

Picking the right ones from that lot is another test of a manager's abilities, and that has to be a positive thing.

So maybe the transfer window isn't so bad after all. Because without it, managers of better-off clubs would rely heavily on chequebook diplomacy, and out-of-contract players would have no lifeline back into the game.