There has been much talk about who would do what in the January Transfer window, and yet, despite all the conjecture, very little has happened.

It is hard to see anything really that will rival the earth shattering last day in 2011 when Fernando Torres and Andy Carroll moved clubs for an astonishing (for all sorts of reasons) £85 million. Indeed, it could be argued that both those transfers going so badly for both the clubs and players concerned has proved a salutatory lesson that all should learn from.

Those two transfers – and the ones which saw David Luiz and Luis Suarez move to the Premier League total spend in the window that ended January 2011 to an eye watering £215 million, but this time around there has been just a fraction of that.

A quick glance at the Premier League Transfer Tracker shows that Gary Cahill swapping the race to avoid the Championship for the race to get in the Champions League is comfortably the biggest transfer, with only nine other clubs signing players for money.

The same glance tells you that nine of the 20 elite clubs in the UK are yet to sign a single player this January.

In and of itself this might not be that odd – most of the big business we talked about above was done towards the end of the window last year, but there does seem to a bigger than usual reluctance on behalf of managers to part with cash.

Part of that, surely, is to do with the summer transfers. Squads are overstocked with players, so at this time of year they are looking to offload rather than freshen up their rosters.

Also it is worth noting that generally in January it tends to be struggling teams that are the most active as they try and avert the slide into the Championship. To that we can add teams with new managers and teams with new owners who are eager to splash the cash, either to impress fans, or to avoid relegation.

In that respect it is easy to see why Queens Park Rangers are just about the most mentioned club on gossip columns so far in 2012. With Neil Warnock gone and flamboyant Airline magnate Tony Fernandes appearing eager to get big name players to Loftus Road, the R’s seem likely to be the big players in the next 14 days.

Whether they get value for money is another matter, as January is a month for ridiculously overblown transfer fees. Not just the likes of Carroll, Luiz and Torres, but in the years since the window has been open, January is the hardest month to buy players it seems, and moreover it seems that the only winners usually are the teams doing the selling.

And it’s a conundrum that all managers have to face. A couple of well chosen signings could make the difference, but get then wrong and the club is in a worse state than ever.

Increasingly too, Manager’s are judged by their signings, just as much as results. With the bigger price tags comes the bigger pressure – and in these days of Media saturation it is tremendously difficult for a player who is having a bad trot to escape, just ask Messrs Carroll and Torres right now. As well as the Managers – for example Carlo Ancellotti – who lost their jobs at the end of last season.

All of which probably explains why so many managers are set to sit this one out, content to work with what they have, watching the mad scramble from afar this time around.

There is of course one hidden cost of this. Sky Sports News lives for the transfer window. It loves having reporters standing at the training grounds of all the clubs that are signing people, while crowds of people build up throughout the day, it loves having Jim White shouting louder and louder as the last minute comes, and what will happen to them if the whole thing is damp a squib as I, and many others, expect?

Surely it will have to come down to Harry Redknapp doing them a favour and talking about the fact that whatever player he is about to sign is a “good, good player, I like him, we’ll try and take him but it’s a long way off.” Like he normally does.

Go on Harry, don’t let us down.