The issue of tapping up in football was thrust into the public’s imagination when it formed the central plot of The Great Game, a comedy-drama film starring Dame Thora Hird released in 1953.
As you can probably imagine, it didn’t trouble the Oscars with its humorous tale of the chairman of a club facing relegation tapping up the star of a rival side. The chairman was eventually suspended after the scandal was uncovered by the footballing authorities.
And perhaps that’s where the scriptwriters, director and producers went wrong. It was too unrealistic: no one ever gets done for tapping up players.
Sometimes it can feel as though the ineffectiveness of football’s “tapping up” rules has been discussed for ever. In the late 2000s, the former Liverpool and Scotland defender Alan Hansen, involved with football from the 1970s, said “it has been going on since the beginning of time”.
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Harry Redknapp, whose time working in football spans from joining Tottenham’s academy in the late 1950s to a manager of eight teams until 2017, several times pointed out the pointlessness of the rules. And Redknapp was the wheeler-dealer of English football – he knows.
Once, when Tottenham were accused of tapping up Peter Crouch when Redknapp was in charge so that the striker moved to north London for less than an offer Portsmouth received from Sunderland, he explained: “Every club lets a player know that they’re interested and anyone who says they don’t is telling lies.”
He added that “it’s not a case of tapping a player up, it’s a case of the agent ringing up and asking if you’re interested”, which sounds as though he was describing precisely what tapping up is.
Since Redknapp’s days, the art form has evolved further. A prominent agent told me recently, on condition of anonymity, that tapping up has shifted to video conference calls, particularly everybody’s pandemic-favourite platform Zoom, but extending to FaceTime and WhatsApp video calls.
There are four-way calls, pitches of what is on offer, they can field questions, discuss plans, allay any fears. They can take place at home on a smartphone, in an office at a prearranged time, or anywhere. An already almost unpoliceable set of rules rendered useless.
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Long gone are the days players contracted to other clubs would be snuck into the training ground to be shown around. But there was still the fear that a manager would be papped sharing a covert coffee with a transfer target, either from a particularly fortunate photographer who happened to stumble upon the meeting, or the even greater modern risk from any member of the public armed with a smartphone in their pocket and an insatiable hunger for the likes and follows that could be gained from posting about it.
With video calls, it’s easy, and unless a player joins a call from the back of his manager’s latest team meeting about their opponents on Saturday, no one gets caught. As the agent said to me, when it comes to tapping up, “there are no rules”.
There are, of course, actual rules. The Premier League’s rulebook takes the matter particularly seriously.
Fifa rules state only that a club must inform another of its intention to speak to their player. The Premier League goes a significant step further by maintaining that written consent must be obtained.
A club can approach the player only “with the prior written consent of the club to which he is contracted,” rule T.1.2. of the latest Premier League handbook says.
The same goes for agents hawking their players to other clubs. By the book, they cannot do so “without having obtained the prior written consent of his club” – rule T.6.
And even discussing it publicly is forbidden, rule T.8. specifying that “a statement made publicly by or on behalf of a club expressing interest in acquiring the registration of a contract player or by a contract player expressing interest in transferring his registration to another club shall in either case be treated as an indirect approach”.
The Premier League successfully took action against Liverpool, Manchester City and Everton in 2017 and 2018 regarding the tapping up of academy footballers (it’s incredibly weird to tap up an 11-year-old, but there you go), issuing fines and academy transfer bans.
But it still happens, and when it comes to first teams its even harder to find solid modern examples. You can cite a handful of cases, at Chelsea, Roma, Sion, a few others.
The action-taken-to-offence-committed ratio make it barely worth the time taken to write the rules. You certainly wouldn’t make a film about it.
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