It's been a quiet January in the Premier League.
Per Transfermarkt, Tottenham are the only club to spend more than €5 million on a transfer: €25 million for Genoa center-back Radu Dragusin. Only three other clubs have spent anything on transfer fees: €4.5 million from Brentford to acquire Sivasspor midfielder Yunus Emre Konak, €3 million from Brighton for FCV Farul winger Adrian Mazilu, and €1.2 million from Luton for Reading center-back Tom Holmes.
There have also been three loan moves -- and that's it. We're almost two-thirds of the way into January, and just eight players have joined the richest league in the world.
Allow me, then, to propose an unthinkable question: Are Premier League teams finally ... getting smarter? I doubt it. (See: this past summer, when teams recklessly exceeded £2 billion in spending for the first time ever.) But let's say Premier League teams wanted to get smarter. How might they approach the minefield that is the transfer market? How might they avoid the failed signings and the wasted millions we've seen so many times before?
We've put together a guide with some do's and don'ts, backed by historical evidence and statistics.