Daily Football Transfer Rumours

What factors affect a football transfer?

Wednesday, 09. 23. 2009  –  Category: Guide to Football Transfer Rumours

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More than likely you’ve been through a process which involved negotiating a contract with an employer, which is usually pretty complex. Now imagine if there were many people representing you, and many people representing your new employer. To add to this, imagine if your old employer had a significant say in the process and your employment contract was worth millions of pounds to you, and to both your old and new employer. Imagine that you could only change jobs for 4 months of the year and that the activity was covered by all major news outlets, and millions of peoples hopes rested on the outcome of the contract negotiations. Now finally imagine if there were hordes of unscrupulous people who stood to get paid as a result of your job, who had access to both clubs and to the media, plus a load of wind up merchants whose aunts used to be tea ladies at the BBC, who ‘knew’ every detail of your employment negotiations.

It’s under these awful circumstances that football transfers are made. To make this a little easier for you, we’ve created a list of the top issues which affect football transfers. This should also give you an insight into how transfer rumours get started.

Manager’s Need / Desire for the Player

This speaks for both the buying club and the selling club. If the selling club manager views the player as fundamental to the team, then he will make a case for keeping the player. If he thinks the player is expendable, if he thinks he can use the money that would be made from the sale of the player to build a better squad, then he probably won’t object. An example of this would be the sale of Dimitar Berbatov to Manchester United. Spurs had a plethora of strikers, and the money that Manchester United were waving in front of them could be much better spent on building strength in depth in the Spurs Squad. This gets more complex when the clubs financial situation has an impact on the available money to spend on players.

Conversely a buying club will have a certain amount available to spend on players. If the buying club’s manager / director of football / Roman Abramovich wants a certain player, he will make a case to the buying club’s owners / board / Roman Abramovich. If they approve the purchase, an offer will be made to the selling club. From this point, negotiations can take between the buying and selling club.

Selling Club’s Financial Situation

If the selling club is at risk with their finances, it will increase the likelihood of the sale of a player, as well as decreasing the power of the selling club’s negotiating power. The fire sale at Portsmouth is a good example of this, particularly the deadline day transfer of Niko Kranjcar. Previously (8 days earlier) Pompey had said they wouldn’t sell for less than £8 million, yet sold him to Spurs on the transfer deadline day for a quarter of that.

Player’s Contract

The length of time that a player has left on his contract impacts the selling clubs control over the player’s sale. The more time left on the contract, the less incentive the selling club has to sell him. A example of this was the proposed move of Javier Mascherano to Barcelona this summer, given Liverpool were unwilling to sell him, and he had three years left on his contract, no matter how much he complained, there was no need for Liverpool to sell him. Conversely the Bosman ruling has meant that players who have reached the end of their contract are able to transfer to any club they want. The recent Webster Ruling has meant that players are able to walk away from a contract after a fixed period of time. The effect of these two rulings has been that if a player is unhappy at their current club and is near the end of their contract, then the player’s current club needs to sell the player if they have any hope of recouping any money from the player.

Player’s Desire to Leave

The two rulings above mean the player has a big impact on football transfers. If the player is happy, generally he won’t move, if he is unhappy then more than likely he will be able to engineer a move.

Buying Club’s Financial Situation

The amount of money the buying club has to offer the selling club for a transfer fee, as well as the player in terms of salary and bonuses has a direct impact on the buying clubs ability to attract players. Ultimately, if you don’t have the money, then you can’t get the player. An interesting example of this has been the transfer of Aruna Dindane, at one stage the condition of the transfer going through was that if Pompey went bankrupt, the cash for the player would be guaranteed by Portsmouth’s TV revenue. In the end this got too hard and he ended up going on loan for a year with an option to buy at the end of the loan period.

Buying Club’s League Position

Ultimately, the success of a club is essential to their ability to attract players. Manchester City have failed to attract any real football superstars, despite their vast wealth simply because they haven’t won anything since 1976.

Player’s Agent/s

Agents get a regular income from a player’s salary, somewhere between 10% and 20%; Agents get a big chunk of any transfer fee. So, if they want to make a lot of money, the best way to do so is to get their star players to transfer clubs.

Other Agents

This is where it can get particularly shady. An agent, who may not have anything to do with a player, can speak to clubs that might be interested in that player to attempt to engineer a move. They may also involve the media to exaggerate the interest. If they are successful in creating this transfer, they will charge a commission for helping the transfer through.

Media

Many football transfer rumours come about as the result of agent speak. While it’s difficult to prove, another major source of transfer rumours are the need of newspapers to fill pages. The role of the media in a football transfer is to fan the flames. An interesting approach to tapping up a player without technically tapping them up is for the buying club to have a friendly journalist release an article about the buying club being interested in a certain player. The manager can then go on record as saying ‘X has a contract with Y Club, which I respect, but X is a fantastically talent player and any manager would love to have him’. This not only explicitly alerts the player to the interest of the buying club, but also forces the selling club’s hand. They either need to respond with a bog standard ‘not for sale’ response, or release a statement about a fee.

As you can see, there are a large number of factors which impact a football transfer and a football transfer rumour. Hopefully this article has also given you an insight into the ludicrous stories you read in the paper every day.

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