Try as he might, Jonas Ankersen just couldn’t make sense of it.
Football as an industry has never been richer. But the number of clubs in financial trouble throughout the European game remains depressingly high.
Ankersen was in his early thirties, a successful entrepreneur and businessman whose brother Rasmus was part of the “Moneyball” approach that has worked wonders at Brentford and FC Midtyjlland. And he believed he had the answer: the transfer market was broken.
Clubs were overpaying, no one knew who was available and a shroud of secrecy prevented the money and players ending up transferring from clubs who had them to clubs who needed them. There was too much reliance on networks or agents and he couldn’t understand why no-one had thought to try and fix it.
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“I saw how online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon were transforming commercial transactions in general and how specialist platforms, especially those in real estate, were changing their industries.
“But football, compared to something like the housing market, seemed to be behind the times. The way transfers were being done was inefficient, and I decided I wanted to try to bring the system into the 21st century.”
His invention was TransferRoom, which is now in its fifth year and is growing into the transfer market’s best kept secret.
“I did a lot of market research with clubs and other stakeholders before launching TransferRoom and it always came back to the same thing: the difficulty of accessing credible market information and an overall lack of transparency,” Ankersen says.
“Those responsible for making decisions involving millions of euros were working in the dark. Very often there was no direct line of communication between decision-makers.
“The result was that buying clubs had no reliable method of finding out which players were available for transfer, and selling clubs did not know what profile of player the buying clubs were seeking.
“Buying clubs want information about as many relevant options as possible, while selling clubs want to have a choice of as many potential buyers as possible. That is TransferRoom’s mission: to give everyone involved in player transactions more market access and more transparency.”
It is staggeringly easy to use – football’s equivalent of eBay. Log on, tap in the position you’re looking for and a list of available players will come up. You can send direct messages to clubs all over the world enquiring about players and clubs can even post footballing lonely hearts on there: asking for a player who plays a particular position while posting their budget for that player.
Over 650 clubs from every continent are now using it, and every Premier League side has a subscription – which can range from a few hundred pounds to five figure fees depending on the level you compete at. Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton and Newcastle have all completed deals through the platform.
This is not where English clubs will look to spend their big bucks. But mid-level players are often traded on there and one star listed on the platform is worth around £20m.
Thousands of deals have now been completed on the platform. Jurgen Locadia’s move from Brighton to Bochum was completed solely on TransferRoom; Ethan Galbraith switched from Manchester United to Doncaster.
Arsenal sourced moves for youngsters Harry Clarke and Nikolaj Moller on the platform.
One executive i spoke to said the platform’s biggest selling point was that it connected clubs. While it would never replace scouting, negotiating and eking out the biggest deals, it is now “essential” for moving players on.
They recently relaunched their “deal days” – which are football’s equivalent of speed dating, with 15-minute slots for executives from some of the biggest clubs in Europe to meet other recruitment staff to talk transfers.
Now the veil of secrecy has been lifted, the belief is that deal makers will never go back to backroom deals or handing power to a select few individuals.
Ankersen says: “We want to build a complete solution for clubs, so they have real time access to all necessary market data and make TransferRoom as important to clubs as Bloomberg is to a financial trader.”
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