In their Shareholders’ Meeting today, Premier League clubs voted to move the transfer deadline day back to the end of August or start of September.

On Thursday, the Premier League confirmed their new deadline day plan is to give up and reintroduce the old system. The summer window will end on August 31st again, or September 1st at 17:00 BST this year because the 31st of August is a Bank Holiday.

This isn’t quite the outcome we were expecting. Earlier reports suggested the Premier League were likely to vote for a system where the internal English window would close before the start of the season, but English clubs could still do business with European clubs until the end of August.

That was a best-of-both-worlds scenario. We avoid transfer speculation around players competing in matches against the club they might join, but don’t cut off the possibility of getting involved with late European bidding wars.

Instead, we’re back where we started. More potential panic buys after an early defeat and performances like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s vs Liverpool await.

As we pointed out in December, there really weren’t many examples of the drawbacks of the new system.

The only vaguely high-profile departures after the English deadline were Nacho Monreal and Alexis Sanchez. It’s not like the rest of Europe were poaching the Premier League’s best players late on.

The PL really should have pushed harder to get the other European leagues to follow suit and move their deadline. Instead, we’re just going to have to deal with the old system again.