PLATFORM: Soccer's January transfer window is a multimillion euro lottery where the winners scoop a jackpot and the losers pay with their jobs.

The next 27 days represent the last opportunity to buy new players before the end of the season. This is one January sale that won't be affected by the credit crunch: rational analysis doesn't work here.

Buy the right man and a manager's career can be saved, or made. For club owners the financial rewards for promotion and relegation are huge: a team in the Premiership will make at least £50 million more than their counterpart in the Coca-Cola Championship over the next three years, the period of the new Sky and Setanta TV rights deal. (Setanta is so keen on the transfer window, fans can follow it live on its website.)

Roy Keane, Niall Quinn and the consortium of Irish businessmen behind Sunderland are among those for whom the next few weeks could make or break their season.

They currently sit in 18th place. If they are still there in May, they go down.

When I spoke to Charlie Chawke, a member of the Drumaville group of investors, at the beginning of the season, he was unsurprisingly bullish. "What Roy wants, Roy gets," was the quote from behind the bar at the Goat Inn.

Well, that time is now. Roy wants Stephen Hunt from Reading. A handful of goals from Hunt would probably be enough to keep Sunderland up. To get him, Keane will need to pay in the region of £3 million, depending on which paper you read.

Steve Coppell, Reading's manager, won't lose his player without a fight, and right now a tug of love is taking place between the two clubs over Hunt.

What makes the normally placid Coppell even more irate is that he, like many of his colleagues in the dugout, hates the January window with a passion. He says it breeds panic and encourages "scurrilous" transfer activity. Without mentioning Keane by name. Coppell went on to say: "It brings on a fire-sale mentality, causes unrest via the media and means clubs buy too many players."

What Keane, Coppell and every other manager in football know, but rarely say, is that the process of buying footballers is utterly flawed, more art than science.

Over the next few weeks, seven-figure sums will be wagered on little more than a hunch, or a tip from a scout. Worse still, the time pressure applied by the introduction of the window means agents are able to ratchet up the anxiety levels still further.

Not to mention their fees. Sven Goran Eriksson was slaughtered in the media after it was suggested that, when he took over at Manchester City at the start of this season, he bought several players without seeing them play.

With City sitting in fourth place in the league, Sven can afford to laugh it off.

However, it is not unusual for managers to pick players using a DVD showreel sent by an agent.

A few lucky ones have a knack for spotting talent.

Arsène Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson are not the two longest-serving managers in the league by accident.

At a conference I attended recently, Ferguson was asked how he judged a player: "I trust my eyes," he said grinning, his forefinger tapping his temple. But a new generation of managers is seeking more objective analysis.

A fast-growing cottage industry has grown up aiming to offer objective analysis of footballers for use by managers, or technical scouting as it has become known.

ProZone, Opta and Sports Universal are the most prominent, providing statistical information based on video tracking.

This is still a relatively labour intensive process. Prozone, for instance, sends films of matches all the way to India, where people manually track the movements of players.

Figures such as distance covered by a player during a game, or the number of successful passes made by that player, can be benchmarked against those of the Premier League, or Champions League averages.

By building up a data bank on each player to measure performance, managers are hoping to succeed in the ultimate transfer window end game: buy low, sell high.

Proponents of technical scouting believe the transfer market, as in any commodity market, is sometimes wrong, and the price of a player reflects a skill that is overrated.

Goals per season, for example, is the most obvious way of judging the worth of a striker. But it ignores how these goals have come about.

Last summer, Spurs paid £17 million for Darren Bent, on the back of two good seasons with Charlton, where he scored goals regularly.

This season he has barely featured in the first team line-up and rumour has it he will be offloaded to Liverpool for £9 million in the next week - a loss of £8 million in less than four months.

Could a more analytical approach have got better results for the Spurs board? How many of Bent's goals was he really responsible for? How many were lucky? How many were served on a plate for him by skilful teammates?

Old-school managers pour scorn on this approach, saying that football is a fluid game and that the statisticians fail to understand the essential intangibility of sport. Furthermore, breaking the skills of a player and the approach of whole teams down in this way makes for formulaic and boring football.

They are good arguments. But as the clock begins to tick and January 31st looms large on the calendar, the search for that one special player who may just keep in you in the big league continues apace.

It may not be romantic, but the scientists might be of more use than the artists.