Blackburn Rovers 'mess' warning raised as January transfer window looms | OneFootball

With less than a month to go before the January transfer window opens, FLW's Rovers fan pundit isn't optimistic about his team's prospects.

This article is part of Football League World's 'Terrace Talk' series, which provides personal opinions from our FLW Fan Pundits regarding the latest breaking news, teams, players, managers, potential signings and more...

With less than a month to go before it opens, clubs will already be making preparations for the January transfer window, but FLW's Blackburn Rovers fan pundit isn't especially optimistic that his club will get it right.

Having finished the 2024-25 season in 7th place in the Championship table, there might have been cause for Blackburn Rovers fans to feel optimistic about the new season. They only finished two points short of a play-off spot last time around. It might not have taken too much tweaking for them to go one better in 2025-26.

But instead, this has been an underwhelming season for the Lancashire club. Rovers have struggled all season, slipping to 23rd place in the table by the third week in October, and although a mini-revival pulled them out of the relegation places, they remain 18th in the table, four points above the bottom three and looking nervously over their shoulders.

The January transfer window offers clubs an opportunity to tweak their squads ahead of the second half of the season, and Blackburn are among those whose squads could do with a little refreshing.

"Something daft like that" - little cause for optimism at Ewood Park over Blackburn's January transfer window prospects

Football League World have spoken to our resident Blackburn fan pundit Simon Middlehurst about his club's prospects for the upcoming transfer window and have asked him what the one banker is for his club in January. Simon is less than optimistic: "One banker that will happen is that Blackburn will probably somehow mess up this transfer window."

Simon believes that his club may find inventive ways of messing things up when they need to sign new players, and that there is historical precedent for this: "If you look at the last few January transfer windows, they haven't been great. We've missed out on signings or things have happened where it comes to administration going wrong, simple things like not pressing 'send' or not signing something, or something really daft like that. The guaranteed banker is that nothing will go right for Blackburn in the January transfer window."

He believes that there is one player who could be on his way out of Ewood Park in the New Year, but that otherwise it's difficult to say what his club will do: "Apart from that, who knows? maybe Makhtar Gueye will look to move on, go on loan somewhere and get some minutes. But with Blackburn you never know what's going to happen. It's like Pandora's Box with us, sometimes."

If Blackburn are to be successful in the January transfer window, they'll need to get their admin right

Our fan pundit isn't being unduly pessimistic in his assessment of what could happen with Blackburn Rovers in the January transfer window.

At the end of the January transfer window in 2024, Rovers thought they'd reached an agreement with MLS club Orlando City to take the US international Duncan McGuire on loan until the end of the season, only to find that an administrative error meant that the player hadn't been registered in time. The error had been that the club had hit "save" rather than "save and send" on the document confirming his registration.

Astonishingly, this wasn't even the first time that something like this had happened to the club in a January transfer window. A year earlier, a deal to take Lewis O'Brien to Ewood Park fell through because the club hadn't submitted paperwork in time. The club's sporting director at the time, Gregg Broughton, later told Lancs Live that "I have zero concerns about the reputation of the club." Broughton left Blackburn at the end of the 2023-24 season.

One player who could be on his way from Ewood Park in January is the Senegalese striker Mukhtar Gueye. Gueye signed for Blackburn in the summer of 2024 from the Belgian club RWD Molenbeek and scored eight times for them in all competitions last season, but he's been largely frozen out of their starting eleven this time around, with all 15 of his appearances so far having come from the bench. He's failed to register a goal or assist for them in 2025-26 so far.

The new year is an opportunity for replenishment, and Blackburn's season so far has indicated that they could do with it. But given their history over the last couple of January transfer windows, they may be best advised to get their business done early, this time around.