This time, no fax machine! Bundesliga club had two Deadline Day mishaps

This time, no fax machine! Bundesliga club had two Deadline Day mishaps Cologne’s transfer almost fell through on deadline day. The deal for Borna Sosa was only finalized three minutes before the deadline. On the final day of the summer transfer window, FC had to deal with several mishaps, recalling the failed Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting deal in 2011. Back then, Cologne’s fax machine was broken, which meant the documents reached the DFL too late. The move collapsed, and the Billy Goats became the laughingstock of the league. Luckily, fax machines are no longer needed in 2026, but Thomas Kessler still broke into a serious sweat over Sosa’s transfer. After the Bundesliga club had reached an agreement with Crystal Palace, the Croatian headed to the airport. But that’s where the first problem arose. “He had forgotten his ID, which then had to be driven after him. That’s why we had to move the medical to the Geißbockheim, otherwise we wouldn’t have had enough time left to sign the papers,” Thomas Kessler has now revealed on the talk show “E Levve lang – der Talk zum FC”. But that was not the end of the mishaps. When the documents were supposed to be uploaded, the computer briefly failed. “At 7:55 p.m. we still had to print something, and all of a sudden the screen froze. That was the first moment I thought: okay, now it’s getting really close,” said Cologne’s sporting director. On top of that, pressure had to be put on the English side, because the transfer window in England only closed at midnight, while in Germany it shut at 8 p.m. The Premier League club apparently had not taken that into account. “They’re less interested in what’s happening in the Bundesliga; they tend to focus more on themselves,” Kessler commented on the situation. In the end, fortunately, everything worked out from Cologne’s point of view, and Sosa did not have to suffer a fate similar to Choupo-Moting’s back then. This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here.