- The proof: spending money on transfers takes a club DOWN the league
- Manchester City fined again, and yet it seems to mean nothing
By Tony Attwood
One of the key approaches by journalists in writing about football is that by and large football is going to stay pretty much as it is.
But every now and then something comes along that means even the journalists recognise that a change might be in the offing – although they like to try and ignore it up to the last minute.
And sometimes, just sometimes, there can be two such events arising at the same time which make it seem desirable to the point of being inevitable for change to happen.
On the one hand, we actually have at the moment parts of the media looking at the current series of games in the USA and asking, as the Guardian does, “Would it be better for dissenting media and discomfited football fans to simply no-platform this event? Which of course leaves the door open to do the same of other Fifa and Uefa tourneys.
And elsewhere there is the slight awareness that one of the changes that is on the foonball horizon might change everything. That is the ruling change that will say that players will have the freedom to break their contracts in return for a fixed “compensation” payment.
Fifpro, the players’ union, has followed through with a court case in the European Courts against Lokomotiv Moscow, in which it was alleged that the club acted illegally by refusing to allow Lassana Diarra, once of Arsenal as you may recall, to leave Lokomotiv Moscow.
That case is old news – about ten years old in fact – but court matters tend to take a long time, although when they do come to pass they can blow a coach and horses through the existing rules (if you can actually blow and coach and horses. I rather doubt that, but I have never tried).
The ruling seems to mean that players will always have the option to buy themselves out of their contract, rather than being trapped with a club. That in turn would open the door to the club wanting to take over a player’s contract can give him the money to buy himself out, and the current employer would be unable to do anything about it.
And this is interesting as last summer PL clubs spent 15% less on signing new players, than in the same period in 2023. It was almost as if they knew something was coming.
Of course the drop in transfer spend was hidden by the media which proclaimed the same level of rumoured transfers, 97% of which never happened. And the drop in spending this summer could be even greater this summer simply because the clubs, are as aware as we are that the bulk of transfers don’t result in club improvement. In fact the opposite is true.
The problem for the media however is that they live on transfer rumours; they cost nothing to invent and even the revelation that between 97% and 98% never result in an actual trransfer, doesn’t seem to bother them. Worse, because of this fans believe transfers are the only way forward and because of that Top clubs and Fifa are battling to resist such a move
FifPor, the union, is preparing to use European law to challenge the status quo via the simple statement taken from the EU rulebook, “Every worker should have the right to end a contractual relationship.” And of course, I know the UK is not in the EU, but all of football in Europe is bound by the same set of rules. If they move, we move.
The way changes are being debated now the idea is that the players’ union will bring the case in Europe, they win easily (since quite clearly football transfer rules are contrary to European law) and the transfer market will collapses with players being available for a fraction of what clubs previously paid.
The response of Uefa is the same as ever: football, they always say, is different. That’s what club owners said in attempting to sustain the maximum wage, and that didn’t work either.
Football’s problem is that no other industry has stood aside from European law as football has done, and so football has no allies. The Diarra case has made it clear that the transfer system breaks EU rules and so it has to go. Fifa likes to behave as if it is a country so makes its own rules – but of course, that is just the inflated egos of those who get their hands on our game.
It is difficult to say what impacts this will have across football – for example, will League One and Two clubs which survive by finding and selling a gem of a player once every four years, now lose that income? It is hard to say, but it certainly looks like this change will happen, and quite soon.
