Alex Duff - Footballs Secret Trade: How the Player Transfer Market was Infiltrated

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Alex Duff

Tariq Panja

This edition first published 2017

2017 Alex Duff and Tariq Panja

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This book began with a riddle. We wanted to know why a company based in a redbrick house in the English town of Rochdale was lending 2 million to two-time European champion FC Porto to sign a striker. The company listed its address as 35 Princess Street, a scruffy part of town neighbouring abandoned buildings with bricked-up windows, an advice centre for the homeless and a builder's yard. CCTV cameras pointed at the front door.

It was 2010 and the Portuguese club had recently reached the last 16 of Europe's Champions League with a squad that included Radamel Falco, Givanildo Vieira de Sousa better known by his nickname of Hulk and Nicols Otamendi. Over the next few years these three players, from Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, would subsequently fetch transfer fees totalling more than 150 million and play at some of Europe's most illustrious stadiums, including Manchester United's Old Trafford and Manchester City's Etihad Stadium, a dozen or so miles away from that ordinary Rochdale house.

As the new season got underway, Porto used the 2 million loan to help finance the signing of a striker to provide cover for Falco and Hulk. Walter da Silva, who had been raised by his mother in a Brazilian slum, was very much an unproven talent, even if he had made his debut in Brazil's Under-20 national team a year earlier.

A second company, based in London's Chancery Lane, provided another 2 million to help finance the 6 million signing. Porto's published accounts showed that this company had acquired 25% of the transfer rights of the striker. That meant it would take a quarter of any fee the striker fetched if Porto traded him to another team before his five-year contract expired.

If Da Silva went on to became as sought-after as Falco, Hulk and Otamendi, it could turn into a lucrative investment. Although it took us three years of digging to find out who the owners of both companies were, it was clear from the start what they were doing: seeking financial returns from the football player transfer market.

Transfer fees have been part of the game since 1890, when they were introduced by the English Football Association to compensate smaller teams for losing their best players to larger clubs. Back then, there was already fierce competition among English clubs for the best talent and the manager of Preston North End, then one of the leading teams, tempted amateur players from the Scottish dockyards with money and jobs such as running a pub.

Transfer fees took longer to catch on in Italy, Spain and Germany, but were later adopted worldwide by the sport's world ruling body, the Fdration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). FIFA regulates the thousands of cross-border transfers that take place each year.

Over the last 20 years, the international transfer market has mushroomed sevenfold in size, into a 4 billion-a-year business. The boom has been fuelled by a steady increase in income from broadcasters and an influx of billionaire owners into the game, such as Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who own Chelsea and Manchester City, respectively.

It was also underpinned by something else: clubs perpetually engage in panic buying of players. In 2014, Ebru Kksal, a former Morgan Stanley banker who was general secretary of Turkish club Galatasaray, explained to a room full of football financiers in Zurich: When the Galatasaray president has a stadium full of people chanting for him to resign, he goes to the boardroom and says: sign three players. Even if, she added, the finance director says we can't afford to do that. I'm not proud to say that for the last 10 years we've been carrying negative cash flows.

Across the game's European heartland a similar theme played out. In a study of 44 teams that year, S&P Capital IQ deemed every single one including 20-time English champion Manchester United below investment grade (sometimes known as junk grade). That's because they were ploughing most of their revenue into transfer fees and player wages in an effort to appease impatient supporters, win trophies and collect more prize money and sponsorships.

Today, the player transfer merry-go-round consumes the interest of the sports sections of tabloid newspapers and football websites, as supporters hungrily consume speculation about which player might fortify their team. The frenzy reaches a climax in Europe on August 31st and January 31st, when sleep-deprived lawyers and agents criss-cross the continent on planes trying to finalize deals before the midnight trading deadline in Europe, where most money is spent. Occasionally, they carry suitcases of cash to help ensure deals go through.