The thread on European soccer leagues has me wondering how teams acquire players. In American leagues, we have an annual draft in which teams take turns picking the top school-age players. Each team then owns exclusive rights to that player for a period of years, after which the player becomes a free agent eligible to sign with whoever has the fattest wallet. Baseball teams draft more players than they could ever use, and winnow them out in “farm systems” of affiliated minor league teams.
I sense that European leagues work very differently. But, I don’t even know enough to ask an intelligent question. So describe the process to me and we’ll go from there.
There’s no draft and there’s no schools, so there’s already a lot of difference there. Clubs generally have their own programs training young kids, and since selling talented players onwards later on in their careers is a huge cash cow for clubs, clubs try and acquire younger and younger players. Lionel Messi (the Barcelona player who is generally considered to be the best there is right now) has been with Barcelona since he was very very young, for instance.
So there’s that; other than that, clubs contract individual players much like any employer would hire an employee (the case of Bosman, a player who went to the European court to essentially establish the football player as a regular employee, is instrumental in this). That means that as soon as the contract is up, the player is free to go and can be hired by anyone else at no additional cost (additional to paying the players salary, that is). Clubs don’t like this, so they generally try and offer players contracts for longer periods of time. This means that when another club is interested in acquiring a player, they will have to pay the club that is employing that player in order for them to give up their contract with that player. This money, paid from one club to another, is the transfer sum, and it constitutes a key source of income for clubs, who see players not only as an asset who can help them win titles, but also as an investment who, if he is successful, may end up making them lots of money. Real Madrid paid 100 million Euros to Manchester United so that they would give up their contract with Christiano Ronaldo and release him from his obligations.
One last thing that may be interesting to add is that the UEFA, who monitors most of this process, only allows transfers during two windows, in the winter and the summer, when most competitions aren’t in business.
Two main ways, really. Many clubs have a youth setup so that they’ll look for boys (teenagers, mainly) who show promise and who’ll get the chance to play in games against others of around the same age. Some of them might, eventually, make it to the top team (usually called the “first team”) and be offered professional contracts.
Subject to various arcane rules, the clubs also buy and sell players from each other. A smaller club may have a very talented player and be tempted by the money if a bigger club makes a generous offer.
You can scout players into your youth system when they’re young (for free) and bring them up yourself, or you can buy them for whatever they’re worth on the free market later on. The best players usually get brought up in the youth system of a smaller local club and then bought by a big club later on when their ability becomes apparent. The transfer prices can be astronomical - Real Madrid paid $128 million for Cristiano Ronaldo back in 2009.
That transfer fee, incidentally, was on top of what they’re paying Cristiano Ronaldo in wages, which is rumored to have started at $15 million a year, rising to $40 million by the end of his contract.
This article describes the youth program at Ajax, a club from the Netherlands. It describes a player academy for seven- and eight-year-olds. And they’ve been watching these kids for years before that.
Is there any controversy associated with this? It seems risky to have players making binding commitments at a very young age. Are the teams ever accused of neglecting the players’ education?
There is indeed an element of controversy over it. In England football clubs make sure their youth team players still receive a full education up to the equivalent of High School, but almost none of them will go to college. They may not have gone to college anyway but football is a risky business for a lot of players - if they pick up a serious injury or if they don’t quite make it (which most don’t), they can be left with very few options.
In terms of contracts the courts tend to be unwilling to enforce binding long-term contracts against kids under the age of 18, and the clubs generally don’t want to give youth players long contracts anyway because they cull a lot of them each year. Wayne Rooney won a case a couple of years ago against a management agency with whom he signed an eight year contract when he was 17, and who sued him when he later reneged on the contract. The court sided with Rooney, holding it was a ‘restraint of trade’ to impose such a long contract on someone so young.
They an always go to university later, whereas sport is a young man’s game, as it were. Stuart Ripley went on the be a prominent solicitor after winning the title with Blackburn, for example.
There are also FIFA rules against signing players under 16 from anywhere outside the club’s immediate area. As contracts under 16 aren’t legally binding in England players that young generally just get an apprenticeship fee and sign at 16 if they’re wanted.
In the major North American sports, my perception is that it’s extremely rare for under-contract players to switch teams under a “transfer fee” agreement like Švejk and others describe above. Trades between teams of mutually-agreeable collections of players, future draft picks, and occasionally other arcana* are far more common.
These trades are sometimes very much against the wishes of one or more of the involved players, but absent a so-called “no-trade clause” negotiated into a player’s contract (under which the player must agree to any trade; some sports permit these while I believe others do not), his opinion doesn’t matter.
My perception is also that player-for-player (draft picks not existing) trades are quite rare in European soccer. Perhaps most of the rest of the world, as well. I don’t know if they are against the rules, or simply aren’t the way teams choose to do business.
Is that accurate?
I’m thinking of the “trade exception” mentioned in connection with Chris Paul deals (some only proposed, one actually executed) in the NBA this offseason. I have no idea what such a thing is, but apparently is has some trade value and can be exchanged between teams as part of a deal.
Agreed. You do, very rarely, hear about a player being traded for cash (which would seem to be the equivalent of a “transfer”), but it’s usually a marginal player.
The fun one in baseball is the trade for a “player to be named later”. In at least three cases, including Dickie Noles, the “player to be named later” turned out to be the same guy.
Most transfers that involve players being traded are usually player for player (plus a bit of cash), or player for a lot of cash (plus a lesser player). A lot of the players used as a “make-weight” are going on loan, also.
The two biggest player for player transfers I can think of in recent years were Ashley Cole from Arsenal to Chelsea for William Gallas plus ~£10m, and Zlatan Ibrahimovich from Barcelona to Inter Milan for Samuel Eto’o and ~€40m. (That Barca-Inter deal still amazes me. If anything, it should have been Inter paying all that money plus a player for Eto’o, who’s a much better player than Zlatan, imo.) That’s 2 big transfers going back almost 6 years, which should tell you how rare they are.
This was common at one time in professional baseball. Minor league teams would sign and develop players, then sell their rights to major league teams. The major leaguers’ desire to bypass such fees was one motivation for forming farm systems of affiliated minor league teams.
More recently, I’ve heard of rights fees mostly in connection with transfers of Japanese players. For example, the Red Sox had to pay $51 million to the Seibu Lions for the rights to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka.
I’m confused - where you say ‘most transfers’ you mean ‘very few’, right? Most transfers are NOT player for player (possibly plus cash), they’re just player for cash. I think it’s because there’s so many players to choose from, perhaps; whereas the pro leagues for the North American sports have about 30 teams, there’s perhaps 10 top European leagues that big teams recruit from, plus some from outside Europe (mostly South America, but teams are casting an ever wider net) so that means that when you are Pep Guardiola, Barcelona’s manager, you can choose to spend your money in literally hundreds of places. Seems less likely that you find what you need right in the club that you are selling someone to.
BTW I agreed at the time about it being weird that Zlatan’s worth more than Eto’o. Today, though, while he’s not with Barcelona anymore, he seems to have vindicated himself and is now very important for Milan, whereas Eto’o has gone the money route and is playing in Dagestan :smack:
Re: who got the better of Eto’o/Zlatan and Inter/Barca…
Inter got Eto’o and a boatload of cash (€46m, according to wiki), and subsequently won the treble that next season. Even though he’s gone now, they still got a good return when they sold him to Anzhi (approx. €26m, depending on the source). Considering Inter throw money around pretty poorly, I think getting the better player for 2 years and a net of €20m, with a treble thrown in for good measure, is really damn good.
And if even you think Inter came out neutral at best, Barca certainly didn’t do well with it. Zlatan simply didn’t fit what the club were about, and I think he had injuries, so his production was nowhere near the pricetag. Barca sold him for €24m (wiki again), so they lost €22m on him for one season, where they lost to (of course) Inter in the Champions League semis. The only thing saving Barca from embarrassment here is that they have the great youth system (as mentioned) and can 1) afford to take a risk more than most clubs and 2) make some nice money on the sales of those youth players (Bojan Krkic, for example).