Chelsea and Man City dominate the loan system. But what is the point?

• Chelsea: 26 players on loan
• Man C: 16 players on loan
• Arsenal: 5 players on loan
• Man U: 5 players on loan
• Liverpool: 5 players on loan
• Everton: 5 players on loan
• Tottenham: 4 players on loan
• West Ham: 3 players on loan
• Southampton: 2 players on loan
• Leicester: 1 player on loan

I haven’t completed the remaining clubs in the league because quite honestly the numbers are boringly similar as far as I can see, and the main point is already made – Chelsea and Manchester City are out on their own even with these lower numbers that Transfer Market gives.

Chelsea’s own site however has them listing not 26 but 37 players on loan.  I can’t find a similar list on Man C’s website but DutchNews.nl says that Chelsea have 10 players on loan to Dutch clubs alone.   So it seems that these numbers for Chelsea and Man C might be significant under-estimates.

The Manchester Evening News did an analysis of the situation at Man City and came up with two reasons why Man C have moved into the wholesale loan market

One reason for farming out new youngsters, of course, is to give them valuable first team experience which they will not get at City.    But there are constraints which also apply to players from outside the European Economic Area.

Under strict new rules introduced last year, players signed from outside the EEA – which Britain will leave as part of Brexit – have to be elite stars.

I am sure that point is right, but I am not sure it is enough of an explanation to cover the whole Chelsea and Man C situation.

Here is the Man City details…

What we should remember is that the Chelsea experiment along the same lines suggests that the chances of finding a youth player who becomes a star through multiple loans is quite low.  The vast majority never get to PL standard.

But this has been going on for a few years now.  In 2015 the Telegraph ran the story “Chelsea have loaned out 33 players who cost £100m with Premier League clubs”

However there is a downside to multiple loaning out.  Imagine, you buy a house, and then just leave it a year or two, maybe renting it out, and then sell it again for 20% profit.  That takes the house away from others who might want to buy it, and doesn’t do anything for the local community in which it exists.  Multiple loans hamper the market and can be used as a way to stop other clubs getting hold of players.

Also, Louise Taylor, writing in the Guardian on 1 September this year quoted the former agent Colin Gordon saying, “It’s an excellent way of hiding your mess by sweeping it beneath the carpet.  Loans can be vitally important in enabling young players to learn their trade but, all too often, they simply enable people to disguise their recruitment mistakes. A lot of clubs fail to perform proper due diligence on signings and quickly discover they don’t want them but are then unable to get their money back. They use loans as a mat to hide bad buys under.”

But although Chelsea and Man City are regular top loaners, other clubs have cut their numbers this year.  A year ago the figures were Chelsea 38, Manchester City, 17, Liverpool 12, West Ham 12.

In terms of individual players Patrick Bamford’s career is one of the most loan orientated: these figures from Wiki…

Years	Team	Apps	Goals
2011–2012	Nottingham Forest	2	(0)
2012–	Chelsea	0	(0)
2012–2013	Milton Keynes Dons (loan)	37	(18)
2014	Derby County (loan)	21	(8)
2014–2015	Middlesbrough (loan)	39	(17)
2015	Crystal Palace (loan)	6	(0)
2016	Norwich City (loan)	7	(0)
2016–	Burnley (loan)	2	(0)

“The most lucrative is almost certainly yielded from Juan Cuadrado. After joining for £23.3m last year, the Colombia forward, who would probably not be recognised by some members of staff at his parent club’s Cobham training base, was relocated to Juventus, where he has returned on a three-year loan for an annual fee of £4.25m. At the end of that period, Juve have an option to buy him permanently for a final instalment, potentially rising to almost £12m.”

Now maths might not be my strongest suit (although I used to do a lot of it and still know my way around a calculator) but I make it that if Juve pay £4.25m a year for three years and then they pay the maximum transfer fee that makes £24.75m income for Chelsea, having paid £23.3m, a profit of £1.45m.  Take off the legal fees, and the salary paid to Cuadrado before his loan and we are down to under £1m.   A lot to you and me, but to Chelsea, bugger all (to use the technical term).   Discount all the staff time, the physical assessments and the like, and the money is gone.

Of course it can work as a system, but the figures suggest that much of the time buying in young hopefuls and lending them out doesn’t work.   But then if you are Man C or Chelsea the money hardly matters, given that Uefa abandoned FFP.  If FFP came back of course that might change things a bit.

The fact that the system brings success seemingly quite rarely suggests that there is

a) a level of desperation among clubs to find players that leads them to do anything to build them up

b) so much money around the losses don’t matter

c) not much thinking about the well-being of the individual players.

That seems more or less like football to me.

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The Long Sleep recalls a time when professional footballers in England were inextricably tied by contract to their club and not allowed to earn more than the statutory maximum wage.  It traces Arsenal’s fortunes through that era, as well as the stand taken by one man who went on a 141 day strike against his club – a strike which led to the creation of football as we know it today.

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