Skip to main content

The transfer market and when it went mad (9th November, 2017)

He warned us.

In the summer of 1999, Nicolas Anelka transferred to Real Madrid for a £22.3 million transfer fee from Arsenal. He became the most expensive player in the history of Spanish football, signing a monstrous £35,000 a week contract.

He called it "an insult to society". Javier Clemente, the former Spain national team manager, blasted the move. "To throw seven billion pesetas out of the window when you could do so many other things... With that much money I could feed all the hungry people in Madrid."

Anelka failed to score for Real Madrid in his first five months at the club, was suspended by the club president in March 2000, and was promptly sold to PSG for the eerily similar fee of £22 million. That's the same PSG who sold Anelka to Arsenal for half a million pounds.

The transfer market was blown open.

There is something sad about the transfer fees being brandied about today - simply because people don't realize who is really paying, and who the money goes to.

Yes, the selling club does get more money, but finds that any replacements they're interested in are more expensive. And yes, the player does get more money, but finds themselves staggering under expectation.

It's the agent who is always content, pocketing a commission and looking for the next big move.

Worse, it's the fans who end up paying the money. The fans end up forking out even more for the privilege of watching the new signing fail to bed in properly with his new team-mates.

We're the losers at the end.

We're the losers because flashy signings distract from the fact that this is an unregulated market. We're the losers because that money could be better used.

We live in a society where 400,000 people had their benefits sanctioned in the UK in 2015, which saved1 the UK government £132m a year. The brutal cuts which make hundreds of thousands of lives a misery cost just as much as Manchester City's net spend that summer (£131.2m).

We live in a society where at least 95 families were evicted every day in Spain in 2014 and yet the previous summer Real Madrid spent €101m on just one player2.

We live in a society where Barcelona's El Prat airport has security staff who have to strike to make their voices heard, who have to work overtime due to under-staffing and a basic monthly salary of €900-€1,100 (£812–£990). Just three weeks later, a football club in the same city delved into a market where a 20-year-old who has played two top-flight seasons in his career3 can cost €105m - and that is considered normal.

Passengers gather as they wait for passing the security controls at Barcelona's El Prat airport due to the strike of security agents.


We live in a society where Italy's unemployment rate in July 2016 was a staggering 11.5% and in the same month a 28-year-old striker4 cost Juventus €90m.

It really is an insult to society.



1 Maybe not - a shocking report by the National Audit Office actually found that while benefit sanctions saved just £132m a year, they cost £285m a year to run. Go figure.

2 Gareth Bale

3 Ousmane Dembélé

4 Gonzalo Higuaín. He is still the most expensive South American footballer of all time; his transfer fee was the highest ever paid by an Italian team and also the highest of a player transferring within any domestic league.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Non-league Incider: St Helens Town 3-0 Atherton Laburnum Rovers

Last game: 8th August: Dulwich Hamlet 2-1 East Thurrock United The previous day, I was blown away by my first ever football match experience. Dulwich Hamlet impressed me, but what impressed me more was the journey. The travel to the stadium was just as enjoyable as the football itself. I had caught the groundhopping bug. There were no games scheduled for the 9th of August. There was one, near Wigan, and all I had booked earlier was a refundable bus ticket from Manchester Airport leaving at quarter past midnight. I should have refunded it. This was a mistake. This whole day was a mistake. I was only slightly hungover from the previous night, but that was nothing compared to this feeling of loss - I couldn't handle the fact that there was a game happening. And I wasn't too far away. Just three hours and a bit. They'll fly by , I thought. I was in autopilot. Something within me made me get up, grab a bag, and get out the door. This wasn't me. I wasn't trave

Non-league Incider: Cray Valley Paper Mills 4-4 Punjab United Gravesend

Last game: 9th August: St Helens Town 3-0 Atherton Laburnum Rovers After ripping up my groundhopping calendar, mostly because I was determined to avoid overnight travel, and partly due to other commitments, there was a period of time where non-league football took a backseat. But that period did not last long. Because of course it didn't. Secretly, I'd loved travelling over ten hours back-and-forth to watch some 10th division football. And this was 9th division football in London. When I had gone to East Dulwich exactly a week back , I had commented on how the amount of graffiti struck me as I watched from on board a southeastern train. I was going the exact same way, but much further this time - then I had stopped at Denmark Hill, now I would have to go six stations further. The graffiti I had thought was so emblematic of south London quickly disappeared, as did the tall buildings desperately cluttered together. We, and by we I mean me, were going to the suburb

Who is Raúl Martín Presa, the Mickey Mouse? Part 1. (20th August, 2017)

José María Ruiz-Mateos was the head and main shareholder of Nueva Rumasa - the company that owned Rayo and other companies - mainly specializing in dairy products. (He wasn't the president of Rayo though - his wife, Teresa Rivero, was Rayo's president). In early 2011, the directors announced a debt of over 700 million euros, that it was on the verge of bankruptcy and that staff wouldn't be paid. And the players were visibly angry about it - captain Míchel assured the press that the club would continue fighting on the pitch, but the day after the announcement was made, six key players didn’t attend training. Veteran midfielder José María Movilla spoke on radio station SER about the situation, about the fact that he had only received seven of the last eighteen months of pay, about the fact that there were a few players who couldn't even afford car repairs. When Rayo Vallecano were about to earn promotion to La Liga despite all the odds - the players not being paid,