For Everton it was a whirlwind end to January.
A new manager in Frank Lampard and two new additions in the shape of Dele Alli from Tottenham Hotspur and Donny van de Beek from Manchester United meant that Everton would head into February with renewed vigour after what had been a wretched few weeks.
This season has been challenging for Everton and their owner Farhad Moshiri, not helped by them sailing so close to the wind with regards to the Premier League's profit and sustainability rules that forced them to impose a summer of austerity in the transfer market, with just £1.6m spent on Demarai Gray and free transfer arrivals of Andros Townsend, Salomon Rondon, Asmir Begovic and Andy Lonergan.
Some breathing space was created after getting James Rodriguez's big wages off the payroll when he moved to Qatari side Al-Rayyan in September, while the £25m exit of Lucas Digne in January to Aston Villa aided matters further.
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The business afforded the Blues the chance to bring in Vitalii Mykolenko and Nathan Patterson from Dynamo Kyiv and Glasgow Rangers, respectively. The combined fee for the due was around £25m.
Not much was expected from Everton on transfer deadline day, after all Lampard had only been through the door a matter of hours and the wriggle room that the Blues did have had become far tighter after the business that had already been concluded.
Loans seemed to be the only real way to bring in quality, and that is what transpired with Van de Beek. But a permanent move was made, one that could cost up to £40m as Everton moved for England international Alli.
The fact that Lampard and Alli shared the same agents through the Creative Artists Agency owned Base, certainly helped expedite Alli's move from Spurs to Goodison Park, but there was still the not so insignificant matter of how they would square the transfer with the profit and sustainability rules that they still had to be mindful of.
The deal for Alli is one where the fee is solely based upon certain objectives being met.
A sum of £10m is due to be paid when Alli makes 20 appearances for the Toffees, with the rest due through Alli reaching 80 games and other milestones being reached.
But with just 18 games left of this Premier League season the 20-game mark won't be reached until August of this year at the latest, and that means that it will miss the end of the financial year for 2021/22 and appear in the 2022/23 accounts instead, thus buying Everton some valuable time to square their finances and make room for further transfer business.
The normal practice of acquiring a player is that the guaranteed sum is amortised across the length of the player's contract.
For example, had Everton paid a guaranteed £40m sum for Alli with no add-ons over a four year contract that would show as an amortised cost of £10m for the next four years in the club's accounts, beginning from the 2021/22 set of accounts.
But with the whole deal involving add-ons and certain milestones being reached, Everton have managed to kick this particular can further down the road and buy themselves some valuable time.
"There will be nothing in the accounts for 2021/22 with regards to the fee," football finance expert and University of Liverpool lecturer Kieran Maguire, author of 'The Price of Football' and creator of the popular podcast of the same name, told the ECHO.
"You have something called an obligating event, which is the trigger by which you have to go and pay the money. So, the obligating event won't arise until 2022/23.
"This allows Everton to shift people off the wage bill in the summer.
"That obligating event of £10m, say that he had signed a four-year contract then you would amortise that £10m over the four years, starting in the 2022/23 accounts. It is a good way of keeping that cost down.
"Presumably as part of the sales pitch to Frank Lampard they would have said how much he would have to spend.
"Frank Lampard is in the last chance saloon at Everton when it comes to big jobs. He's had three managerial jobs so he would have been cautious before taking the job and therefore there must have been some soft promises at least."
Everton have a number of big earners out of contract at the end of this season, with Fabian Delph, Cenk Tosun, Begovic and Jonjoe Kenny among them.
In the case of Delph and Tosun, longer deals seem unlikely.
Then there is Moise Kean to consider, with Juventus, where he is currently on a two-year loan deal, having an obligation to buy the forward in the summer of 2023 for a reported fee of around £24m.
The structure of the Alli deal is a creative piece of accounting that affords Everton valuable space to manoeuvre and bring in a player who Lampard feels will aid their chances of climbing up the table and fighting off the threat of relegation from the Premier League.
