Do you remember when the transfer window used to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, when deadline day produced actual surprises and everything didn’t feel quite so cash-sodden and grim?
Well we do. The transfer market increasingly feels stuck in a perpetual decline. We want to change that.
And so, without further ado, here are i’s six changes football and the Premier League needs to make to fix the transfer market.
Profitability and Sustainability Regulations need a proper reform
For a third of the clubs in the Premier League, three letters are guaranteed to bring them out in a cold sweat: PSR.
Spending rules have been around in one form or another for 13 years but it was last year that they begun to bear teeth. Points deductions for Nottingham Forest and Everton were a tipping point for clubs who are now – in the words of one executive – “running scared”.
At Newcastle United they have found a glass ceiling preventing them from investing in players to take them forward. A nadir was hit on Tuesday when Eddie Howe, coach of the supposedly richest club in the world – an epithet they’ve always resented, in fairness – said the club couldn’t afford to bring in both a centre-back and right winger.
While opposition fans might peer in and mock given the source of their new-found wealth, there is a problem here for clubs with ambition to break into the top four. How is it possible when spending on players is impossible?
Reform is coming down the tracks in the form of Uefa-inspired squad cost controls but one frustrated executive likened it to “shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic” when it came to helping clubs with ambition. “Frankly it won’t help at all,” they said, succinctly.
More creative answers are out there. A luxury tax – where ambitious clubs “buy” PSR headroom from the Premier League and the money is then redistributed – has been mooted but did not get off the ground.
Another Premier League club renowned for its innovation put forward a proposal to auction off their PSR headroom to the highest bidder.
“At the moment you get no reward for being compliant, just punishment for not being. We felt that should change but it didn’t get much of a hearing from the Premier League,” they lamented.
Their warning was clear: without creative thinking, the advantages the Premier League has enjoyed in player recruitment are going to be washed away by PSR and its successors.
Implement tighter rules around multi-club models
Everyone thinks multi-club models are fun until Al-Nassr turn Rotherham into their feeder club. There’s been a sharp increase in Premier League owners investing in clubs elsewhere, primarily with the aim of using those clubs to develop talent and hoard younger players.
This disincentivises developing homegrown talent while removing the soul and agency of often-storied clubs around the world in the process. Strasbourg fans have repeatedly protested against Chelsea’s owners, while Manchester City’s City Football Group have overseen Troyes’ double relegation to Ligue 3.
Ownership groups like John Textor’s Eagle Football Holdings or even 777 Partners have had mixed-to-terrible results at clubs worldwide.
It also heavily impacts the market for younger players. Clubs can stockpile younger players at other outposts of their multi-club model and give themselves first refusal if they develop well.
This has formed the foundation of Brighton’s recent success and City recently benefitted from it through the £30m signing of 20-year-old Savinho from Troyes.
While the Brazilian is probably delighted, he only made the move because City had the privileged opportunity to take a risk on him early and move him to Troyes, a club he never played for and who saw no real benefit from his talents.
Really, the only people who profit from multi-club models are already-wealthy owners. They remove teams’ identities and alienate fans, all while acting as the holding pen for prodigious 18-year-olds somewhere bigger isn’t quite ready for.
While banning multi-club models outright is infeasible, there could be tighter regulations or disincentivising measures put in place.
Greater transparency is needed around the bidding process for players who move between clubs in multi-club systems. There should be measures to ensure suitable separation between leadership structures within clubs.
Untangle the market for very young players
Two years ago the adverts started popping up on industry websites. Clubs in London after more Midlands and north of England scouts, those in the Midlands looking to creep towards the south west and south east.
The reason? Brexit. With Premier League clubs now unable to scout the best under-16 players from Europe, they had to start parking their tanks on the lawns of their rivals.
Steve Harper, the director of Newcastle United’s academy, told i that PSR rules meant clubs were piling money into this new “transfer market”.
“With Brexit everyone is looking at the same group of players so the internal academy recruitment market has got mega competitive and with the rules set up to encourage people to develop their own and sell them on it’s become even more competitive,” he said.
Four years on from Brexit, we’re starting to see the impact filter through. The rewards of selling players tempted out of other Academies, played a few times in the senior side and then moved on are clear: more PSR ‘headroom’ and more spending power for the established ‘big’ clubs.
The answer? One recruitment executive thinks the Premier League needs to work closer with the Government to allow work permits for young European players. Another thinks geographical restrictions on academy players – and limits on the sort of financial inducements being offered – would help.
“Our league is suffering, and the transfer market is getting distorted. The Premier League is a great export but this is having a huge impact that is now filtering into the transfer market,” he tells i.
Rebalance football’s inflated wage structures
There’s an odd trend on show in the Premier League of late – footballers are getting markedly younger. In principle there isn’t anything wrong with that, but the reality is more complex.
Over the past decade, the number of players over the age of 26 getting Premier League moves has almost halved from 34.4 per cent of all permanent signings in 2014-15 to just 17.5 per cent this summer. Eight top-flight teams haven’t signed a single player over 26 and no 29-year-old has joined a Premier League club on a full-time deal this summer.
On the other hand, 29 per cent of transfers 10 years ago were of players aged 22 or under, up to 45 per cent this summer. 22 is the new 24, but what does that mean for football?
This trend has more serious long-term than short-term implications. For one, it risks making football an even shorter and more precarious career than it currently is, with damaging results for players’ wellbeing as it encourages higher turnover of youngsters.
More generally, it restricts the talent pool and limits experience at the elite level if older players have to drop out of the Premier League to find contracts and game time.
This then either forces them to Saudi Arabia – the main country with clubs able to pay the higher wages older players expect – or limits these players to only moving around a handful of English clubs. 29-year-old Raheem Sterling is now a prime example of that, 28-year-old Ivan Toney another.
This pushes up prices for younger players, in turn putting more pressure on them and potentially damaging their careers.
The primary factor in the decline of interest in older footballers is that they command huge wages. As football finance expert Dr Rob Wilson explains: “There is no value in transferring players in that 26 and up category, because they typically are expensive and come with significant wages.
“In terms of your PSR compliance, they don’t represent good value. The reason why we’ve seen a flurry in younger players, and certainly academy prospects, that have come through, is you book them as pure PSR profit, so that gives you some headroom, and that allows you then to go out and spend.
“Even if you put in a fairly significant transfer fee for young players, you can amortize that over the contract.”
And so the practical next step is for wages paid to players above 26 to drop sharply over the coming years in order to save their careers and rebalance the market. This may not be popular, but it will allow players to extend their careers and football to retain valuable experience and talent for much longer.
Sort out the EFL settlement
If you speak to most directors of football, they’ll tell you the problem isn’t buying players. Anyone can do that. The issue for most of them is selling players who haven’t worked out or are no longer the right fit for their club.
And for that they blame the EFL transfer market shrivelling up. “If you want to sell someone, Championship clubs mostly can’t afford them now. The best you’re likely to get is a season-long loan with wages fully covered,” one Premier League recruitment head tells i.
Making the EFL sustainable and giving them spending power feel like two really big issues for the English game. One League Two chief i spoke to said that the entire league was “basically unsustainable as it stands”. Last season Stockport and Wrexham were entirely reliant on wealthy owners and “utterly distorted” the market by paying “Championship level” fees and wages for players.
A £900m “settlement” from the Premier League to help stabilise the rest of the football pyramid has been in the pipeline for almost a year now, with the Government having urged them to agree it as recently as March.
Signing the big cheque and tackling the EFL’s issues is the first step to sorting out issues further down the leagues.
Further regulate non-football associated-party transactions
Much of the talk about non-footballing associated-party transactions (APTs) focusses on sponsorship deals like Manchester City’s Etihad deal or Newcastle’s Sela contract, but there is an even grubbier side to this which needs dealing with.
In the past two seasons, Chelsea have sold two hotels and a car park at Stamford Bridge to another holding company they own for £76.5m, then done the same with their women’s team for an even higher fee. They can then book these as sales against PSR, allowing them to spend even more wantonly.
This isn’t in the spirit of PSR and shouldn’t be permitted within it either. Up to this point, Premier League clubs have hesitated to follow the EFL and Uefa in banning these non-football associated-party transactions. That should change now.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/t2OA1hS
Post a Comment