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By Tony Attwood
The story is, in essence, simple: the purchasing of players by football clubs is not always quite what it seems. Players can be bought to improve the side, or to be matured and sold at a profit, or to stop another club having the player, or to reduce the club’s tax liability in the current year (by reducing the club’s profit while hoping the player’s value might rise) or indeed to mislead everyone else as to what the buying club is up to.
So let’s take an example. Arsenal want to buy players X, Y and Z, but other clubs come along, and knowing that Arsenal are after these players, are willing to pay higher prices. Arsenal might feel aggrieved while not being willing to pay extra money for the players they wanted. But equally they might be laughing, having used their supposed interest in the player merely to help push the price up, and waste the buying club’s expenses.
Meanwhile the media, being primarily only interested in simple, immediate stories, tend not to ask the most obvious question: where did the buying club get this money, and what has made them suddenly offer over £100m for a player who a year ago was thought to be worth £50m (my figures are of course invented for the sake of this example). Or come to that “Why did Arsenal buy this flop?”
Matters are complicated as many clubs are not cash positive – they don’t have the money to buy the player, and so offer to pay for a player over a number of years, gambling that through his playing skills he will take the club up the league. In effect, hoping that the player will pay for himself by increasing crowds, being sold for a higher fee, etc etc. In short, it is gambling twice – once on whether the player helps the club win games and one whether the player can be sold for more than he was bought for.
Of course clubs don’t have to reveal exactly what they paid for a player, but it is in the interest of buyer and seller to up the price. For the buying club it says to their fans – “we are really investing in the club”, and for the selling club it says “we’re making money to keep the club afloat.”
Quite often therefore, a player can have two prices – one that suggests how much he is bought for, one saying how much he is sold for. The media, of course, lap up the story, not least as the sports pages don’t employ detectives, and sports journalists tend simply to copy each other’s data. Besides, if any journalist starts to reveal what is really going on, they won’t be invited into a club in future.
Clubs only reveal what they want to; sports journalists are not experienced in uncovering secret transactions, and fans think their club is splashing the cash. So since the media just print what the clubs and agents tell them, neither the details of the HP agreement nor just how many years the payment is being made over may be published. And the players like this it because the arrangements can appear to inflate their values.
Meanwhile journalists like it as they get two stories without doing any work and it is then easy to imply that Arsenal: too slow, too mean, lacking in adventure and so on. And of course if they can find a reason to suggest Arsenal has just bought a flop that no one else wanted, so much the better. (The fact that the player subsequently turns into a good squad member having perhaps changed position or alterned his style of play, is ignored, and his past is then forgotten).
Of course, if the player bought is not that good, there will be a backlash, but excuses (notably injuries, or the fact that the player has not settled in his new city) can be found. Besides, every club has some purchases that just don’t work out. But there is little doubt that the club that takes a few risks tends to do better than the club that just follows the media.
Meanwhile, some transfers are indeed straightforward, and these can distract from the convoluted tales, but one aspect of transfers remains the same: clubs don’t pay each other for players at once, but do so over time, so if a club buys a player for £60m they will normally pay this over the yeas of the a number of years. Then if they don’t have the cash, they can either sell someone else, or get a bank loan. So putting a player on an 8-year contract will be taking a huge risk but also spreads the purchase over eight years and makes the accounts look much healthier. Which is good news if you are trying to sell some shares. Buying a player who has not done too well elsewhere, is far less of a risk than one might think.
Plus clubs can often agree to sell the player on again after three years to another club for a set amount of money. That is guaranteed income but a gamble. But these three years on transfer help persuade the bank that all is ok. So Club X agrees to buy Player A for £100m, at £20m a year. Then the club X agrees to sell Player A after three years to Club Y for, say, £40m. You can see how this gets complex.
And there is the reverse process – that the buying club guarantees not to sell the player to one or more specific clubs within three years, and indeed guarantees to put such a clause into the contract of any club that it sells the player to. So one club is controlling who another club can buy. It can get far more complex than the media suggest. But most of all, the clubs that really make the system work do take some gambles, and a few of them work. Not all, but it only needs a few.
