Articles on Transfer Process in General

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Guardian/Owen Gibson

Premier League clubs take risks with new rules in rush for riches

Transfer deadline activity shows that the effect of financial fair play regulations has so far been limited and unpredictable

Two conflicting forces, both emanating from Uefa's tranquil HQ on the banks of Lake Geneva, have been affecting the Premier League's biggest clubs during this transfer window.

On one hand are the new financial fair play rules supposed to usher in a new era of parsimony and restraint. On the other, a desperate fear of missing out on the Champions League, and not only the guaranteed financial windfall (Manchester United banked £53.2m last season) but its importance in the global brand-building arms race that the clubs hope will help them boost revenues and compete in the new FFP landscape.

A cursory glance at the back pages this summer – detailing a longer than ever list of big-money transfer sagas – and the running total of cash spent will indicate that fear of not making the Champions League is winning out over reining in spending.

Overall spend is significantly up on last summer and could even rival the high point of the summer of 2009 when Manchester City's unprecedented spending spree began in earnest. With more than usual spent last January, the overall gross spend for the calendar year may surpass the 2009 figure of £675m.

Gianni Infantino, Uefa's general secretary, was right to point out last week that this was hardly a case of one last splurge before the new break-even rules kick in. Transfer outlay will be amortised over the length of the players' contracts and contract commitments will obviously figure for years to come, so everything spent in this window will have to be accounted for under the new regulations.

But it is also true that clubs who are hauled before Uefa's financial control panel will get some credit for reporting a "positive trend in the annual break-even results", meaning that if clubs feel the need for one last spree it makes sense to do it now. "It's never been as black and white as some people think. Throwing a club out of Europe has always been the ultimate sanction but it is a last resort," said Dan Jones, a partner at the Deloitte Sports Business Group.

"Uefa are taking it seriously, but it's never been as hard and fast. But I think it will have an effect over time – just because something is hard to do, doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to do."

Since first Tottenham Hostpur and then Manchester City shattered the hegemony of the big four, thoughts of parsimony have gone out of the window. The fear is that financial fair play will over time lock in a natural order and that non-qualification will freeze clubs out of the upper echelons. That is what has driven Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool to spend this summer and motivated Arsenal's last-ditch trolley dash.

Outside last year's top six, only the very busy Sunderland, Wolverhampton Wanderers, the newly taken-over Queens Park Rangers and - perhaps most eye-catchingly - Stoke City have spent significant sums.

But although the total outlay by English clubs remains large, the overall net spend is down as a result of a swing towards shopping domestically rather than abroad. In 2010 top-flight clubs spent £356m on players of which £99m (28%) went to other English league clubs. In 2011 well over half of total expenditure was on players from other English clubs.

Players such as Jordan Henderson, Phil Jones, Stewart Downing and Ashley Young have moved between Premier League clubs. The promising Connor Wickham and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain moved from the Football League for big fees. Although there has been an increase in trickle down to the Championship, the majorityof that money has remained within the Premier League.

"It would seem that the Premier League's squad composition rules are beginning to have an affect with a notable increase in investment in young English talent," said Geoff Mesher, a forensic accounting partner in Grant Thornton's Sport Advisory Group. "This has the added benefit of retaining a greater proportion of wealth within English football. However, examples of lower-league clubs being the beneficiaries of such investment are rare."

"Whilst Arsenal plucked Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain from Southampton, the majority of high-value teenagers seem to be with Premier League clubs at an early age meaning the lower-league clubs are, perhaps, not receiving the financial rewards of finding and developing young players that they might have expected in times gone by." The trend has been praised by some, who see it as strengthening the domestic game. It has been driven by a combination of Uefa and Premier League regulations, introduced last summer and requiring every 25-man squad to have eight "home-grown" players as well as allowing an unlimited number of players under 21, and financial logic.

Even at higher prices, the fact that transfer fees can be amortised over the course of a four- or five-year contract and that wages are often lower than overseas alternatives means that buying young and British still makes sense.

One other area where the new Premier League rules introduced last summer, and the looming prospect of FFP, has influenced thinking is in the imperative to trim high-earning fringe players. At Chelsea, Manchester City, Spurs and Liverpool there has been a longstanding ambition to move some of those players off the books.

The new rules have also put an even higher premium on youth. The thinking is threefold: younger players tend to be cheaper in terms of wages, have more resale value and are encouraged under the new rules.

In this window, Premier League clubs have spent more than £130m on players under the age of 21. That compares with £60m in 2010 and just £21m in 2009.

During 2010-11, there was a 28% increase on the previous year in the number of on-pitch appearances by English players under 21. While the overall number of players under 21 went down slightly, from 59 to 55, the number of appearances they made increased from 483 to 616.

And it is not only domestically where big spending continued unabated. "The other thing that's quite noticeable is the pace of spending increasing faster in continental Europe than in England," said Jones, noting the outlay by Qatari-owned Paris St-Germain in particular. "That's a bit of a surprise given the strikes in Italy and Spain this summer."

So the new rules are having some effect – if not always in the way their creators intended – and the most profligate clubs, Manchester City and Chelsea foremost among them, will continue to insist they can balance their books and spend big. Eventually, something will have to give – just not quite yet.

www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/aug/31/premier-league-clubs-transfer-spending

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INDEPENDENT

James Lawton: It's time to shut the transfer window anarchy and restore game's lost lustre

What we are left with is a strong case for one shortened window in the summer, when a club has had a season to assess its strength and needs and has a strategy based on vision and planning

Thursday, 1 September 2011

It is over now, thank God, all the power moves of the big clubs and the desperate lunges of the small ones and the distortions they work on what we used to know, laughable though it sounds now, as the balance of football power.

The trouble is the transfer window will be re-opened soon enough – in four months' time – just in case Sir Alex Ferguson or Roberto Mancini or Andre Villas-Boas or Kenny Dalglish want to rectify the odd mistake, prop up a hint of weakness in their squads, or some new oligarch or sheikh has blown in with a fortune to spend.

Then we have to stomach again the wretched underlining of the game's most salient fact.

This is the now unshakeable understanding that no loyalty runs too deep in football, no attachment has sufficient meaning, to prevent it being torn away in the time it takes some opulently suited agent to pick up a phone and run a few numbers past his client.

A client, for example, like Luka Modric who last weekend told his Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp that if he could get his head around the figures Chelsea were ready to print on his payslip the same could not be said of his professional obligation to the club who have paid his not inconsiderable wages for some years.

Modric said he could not play against Manchester City because his head wasn't right. What about his heart and his pride? Plainly it had flown through the transfer window – just like Javier Mascherano's at the same time last season when he also told his club, Liverpool, he wasn't right to play against Manchester City. He had his mind on Barcelona, he explained.

A few voices are being raised against the anarchy of the transfer window, how it still hangs open at the formative stages of a new season, how it has created Arsène Wenger's demeaning scramble to do the work he is now legitimately charged with neglecting in the close season when managers and coaches might be reasonably expected to shape their campaigns.

Villas-Boas now says that he is going to argue for a major contraction in the time of the summer market but disappointingly it is not because of the devastation it causes to the professional values of players like Modric and Mascherano but because it will improve the "tranquillity" of the big-gun managers like himself who, having spent their money, want to get on with the business of making a team.

Perhaps a little more managerial tranquillity – especially at Arsenal – might do wonders for the quality of football at the top end of the game, but it is hardly the most pressing reason for ending the grisly transfer agitation that has already so deeply disfigured the new season.

The drama of Modric's situation stretched through the summer. It dominated Tottenham's horizon. It led the club chairman Daniel Levy to take a position on which many in football could not decide until the passing of last night's deadline. Was it a moral stand or a trading ploy? Given the view from the transfer window, and the fact that three years ago Spurs submitted to the pressure exerted by Ferguson and sold Dimitar Berbatov to Manchester United at the last available moment, not even Levy could complain about the scepticism.

What we are left with, surely, is an overwhelming case for one shortened transfer window in the summer, when a club has had a season to assess its strengths and needs and must rely not on emergency spending into the new campaign – and the kind of £50m top-up that saw Chelsea sign an under-performing Fernando Torres last January – but a strategy that has more to do with vision and planning than reflex spending.

When the system was imposed nine years ago, Steve Coppell, set to embark with considerable skill on his reign at Reading, was an immediate critic. He said the new system bred panic and encouraged ruthless transfer activity. He could not see the logic of its fire-sale mentality, its power to unsettle players and lead managers with money in their pockets to lay waste to the strivings of those rivals who did not.

Coppell's complaint was an early cry against the tyranny of money, impure and simple and of course it was never heard above the clamour of the transfer chase. Some insist that the transfer window is inherently sexy, that it creates for four months out of every 12 a web of intrigue and expectation.

Unfortunately it also has the capacity to rip away the heart of a club and the faith of its supporters. One phone call can turn an already uneven playing field into a precipice. It makes a pariah out of a hero, Modric knows now, and it meant that Torres was speaking of reality when he said that the shirt-kissing days were well and truly over.

No one can stop the transfer market but if we didn't know before that it had to be controlled, we know it now. Football should trade for a month each summer – and then let the best team win.

www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/james-lawton-its-time-to-shut-the-transfer-window-anarchy-and-restore-games-lost-lustre-2347058.html