In his fortnightly exclusive column for CaughtOffside, Jon Smith, one of football’s first-ever agents and a man who was an integral figure in the forming of the Premier League, discusses Chelsea’s dangerous FFP game, why Mo Salah could leave Liverpool now, how the Saudi influence on football could see them buy a new Super League, Arsenal’s brilliant transfer window and more!
Arsenal had the best transfer window with Brighton not too far behind
I watched the Arsenal game and I think their buys have been fantastic – although I’m not sure why they bought Kai Havertz. It’s only a personal view but why would you pay £65m for an off the bench player. That’s just my opinion.
Arsenal are still not yet the finished, confident article. They still don’t like it if you put it up them, if you run at them, if you hustle them, but their ball playing abilities are fantastic. I think they’re going to be there or thereabouts. For me, it’s them or Man City who are going to challenge this year. I think Mikel Arteta has done a remarkable job. The whole club is a smiley place to be!
I also thought Brighton had an absolutely stunning window. To buy Caicedo for £4.5m and sell him a year later for £115m… I had to call Paul Barber (Brighton’s Managing Director) and say to him “oh my god, you know a few years back I was fortunate enough to get an OBE… for what you’ve just done, you should get a Knighthood!” He just laughed. Stunning business. You could say Brighton were playing hardball but that would be buying for £4.5m and selling for £40m, not £115m!
You can’t always plan for transfers
The markets all around the world have seen transfer values rise, but don’t forget that this is an arbitrary valuation. If I’ve got a player sitting at Brighton and I think he’s worth £100m, and everyone else thinks I’m an idiot because he’s worth £60m, I’m not selling him for £60m because in my opinion, he’s worth £100m. If you don’t want to pay my price, so be it.
That’s why the end of the transfer window gets frantic.
What normally happens in a window is that most clubs, especially the bigger clubs, will plan ahead and start on deals two, three, even six months beforehand, working towards an agreement that everybody knows all parties are happy with, with the move eventually happening in June before everyone goes off for holidays.
There’s a few early deals that move because positions need filling, but after that everyone keeps their cards very close to their chest. Don’t forget, most players are back in training in July – and that’s only the middle of the window. You’ve got pre-season training, then you’ve got games, then you’ve got injuries. Then you’ve got things that aren’t quite working out, for example a couple of clubs might have a new manager….
The later you get in the window, the more urgency is applied to deals, and only then can plans be thrown out of the window. That player you didn’t want to pay £40m for earlier in the window suddenly becomes the viable option.
I’ve been involved in so many situations where the deal should be done but somebody, the buyer or the seller, is playing hardball – and it’s only July 18th. Now, if it was August 28th, you know that somebody’s going to have to make a quick decision.
Saudi window will cause problems for Liverpool as I think Salah will go
With regards to the closure of the transfer window in terms of the times (11pm GMT, 6pm CET for Germany, 7pm CET for Italy), in Europe it’s purely down to administration and actually being on the frontline on deals. It wouldn’t worry me, it just makes it a bit more awkward. It’s the same day, you’ve just got to make sure that if your players are going to Germany that the deals are done five hours earlier.
It’d be nice to uniform it and have it if all done at 11pm GMT because that’s midnight in Europe, but it’s an administrative thing rather than anything that’s overly football related. However, the disturbance now is having the Saudi league with all that money to throw around. Their window closes on September 7th so they’ve still got some time to get deals done.
I think Salah will go which is very disturbing for Liverpool. At his age, money has to be the the deciding factor I’m guessing, and it’s a pretty educated guess though I might be wrong. My guess is that he will go because Saudi could write a check for £200m easily. Where else are Liverpool going to get that sort of money and where else is Salah, heading towards the end of his career, going to earn, potentially, £95m a year.
The Saudis have got £17bn to spend in football. I’ve spoken to a number of political experts who say that regimes like Saudi are socially unacceptable but they want global influence, so politically, it’s a problem for them. They buy that influence, however, through using sports as it touches so many people’s heartbeats.
Sport becomes very influential because where else could you get so many people talking about it? Think about it. In such a short space of time, they’ve apparently got that £17bn to use exclusively for football. That is probably three days revenue for them – and it makes them look good.
FIFA and UEFA should be very worried about Saudi’s buying a Super League
Are the Saudis going to be able to powerhouse themselves into football? They can do it in boxing, hosting various world championship fights and anything else that they might fancy with the kind of money they have behind them. In football, are they going to be the new instigator of a Super League because once they’ve got their own league going…
Supporters of a certain age now are unlikely to become Al-Hilal fans, but their kids or their grandkids could, because the Saudis will globalise the game. It will be a long, slow burn because football is tribal. I support Arsenal because my dad did and his dad did, and my children do and probably their children will, so that’s like a tribal following. However, if Al-Hilal are fun, their PR is great, they’ve got great players and they’re selling lots of merchandise around the world, it changes the dynamic.
If I was UEFA and FIFA I’d be getting a little bit concerned. Let’s say the Saudi league wants to expand itself and wants to entertain a global league every year… they go to Manchester United and say here’s a billion pounds and they do that to the 10 best teams around the world – they’ve bought themselves a Super League because very few people are gonna turn that down.
What happens when FIFA try and say ‘right, you’re all out of football?’ Look what happened in golf. The PGA threatened everyone, stood up and made lots of noise and then LIV bought them because they could. My final point on this is that Gianna Infantino (FIFA President) has a home in Qatar. He’s also got a lovely home in Switzerland and I’m sure Qatar is a beautiful place to live, but the Middle Eastern powerhouses are the only other people that could challenge a dynamic as we’ve just described.
Chelsea are playing a very dangerous game with FFP
Financial Fair Play was put in place based on your turnover. Clubs can only spend a certain amount and they can only have currently up to £110m of debt, which the directors have to guarantee.
So it puts a framework around the clubs not being able to just go out and buy the league. UEFA started the process and the EPL and EFL now have their own versions of it. It’s supposed to level the playing field financially but of course, clubs like Man City can potentially acquire assets to put on their balance sheet, be that real estate or footballing assets or whatever. The framework is continually adjusting.
In fact, looking at Chelsea, they’re getting around this at the moment by amortising their costs. They’re signing Player A because he’s a good player and they’re happy to pay £100m for him. They’re saying, right, Player A, you’re going to be here now for eight years, which means that £100m now is amortised over eight years, as opposed to four/five which is a normal contract.
Of course, Player A wants to make sure that he’s paid commensurately so that he doesn’t miss out in seven years time, which means Chelsea are having to inflate their wage bill at the same time, and are getting perilously close to those FFP barriers in the process.
If Player A doesn’t turn out to be a good player, and they have to sell him after three years, they’ve either got to swallow a huge loss, because his value will have gone down and no one else will pay his wages, or he has to sit in the reserves and collect £120,000 a week. It’s a dangerous game because although it may deliver success in the short term, if it doesn’t, chickens and roost and all those words come to mind.
Chelsea used to have a really good system where they developed a lot of young players without shelling out a lot of cash. They brought in a huge amount and then loaned them out all over the world, watching them play and then bringing them back to renegotiate with them if they were pertinently successful. It was great but was stopped because it was thought to be exploitative, and circumvented certain regulations on staff, squad numbers, etc.
The regulations are going to change next year and, in time to come, the ceiling of losses against your turnover will drop. Clubs will argue against it because life has got more expensive, rising inflation etc., but what that means is there’s a lot for the administrators to be thinking about over the next few months and in the next couple of years.
Many players could find themselves needing new agents in the next couple of months
The next set of agents exams in the UK are very close. The 20th of September is going to be quite an interesting day. Not only is it my birthday and the closure of the Saudi transfer window, but it’s also the the second exam date for all these agents. What I said before has now proven to be correct – which is that there’ll be an avalanche of transfer deals (before the summer deadline) because a lot of agents didn’t pass their UEFA Football Intermediary exam the first time. Bear in mind too that with regards to English agents, only 18% of them passed the exam first time round.
There’s a lot of people out there who technically, when the new regulations come in as they will do in October, won’t be able to practice anymore. If they fail the exam in September again, they can’t take an exam for another year so that puts them out of business for 12 months, which in this business is fairly onerous.
January and next summer will be really interesting because there’ll be less agents. They will have to join up with the bigger boys (agencies such as CAA) and there will be lots of convoluted partnerships.
Players will have to change agents if their agent is not allowed to practice. The agent can become an advisor in their system somewhere, but the player will have to sign to another agent, which is why I said there’ll be lots of convoluted deals and partnerships. The only people that I believe will really benefit are the bigger agencies.
What Fabrizio Romano is doing isn’t new; I was doing exactly the same 15 years ago
Fabrizio Romano’s podcast appearance with Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards has caused some controversy over his comments that players go to him if they want to put it out there that they’re angling for a move. To be perfectly honest, that’s been happening for years. I did the same thing years ago.
I made friends with all the media, especially with The Sun who, at the time, were seriously powerful, and we’d drop potential news in to stir the pot beforehand. My fingerprints wouldn’t appear because I was friendly with all forms of media. Today, using people like Fabrizio and David Ornstein with big social followings to just shout it out there globally, is a potent weapon.
The Sun was very good and it was read in the UK, but now, if Fabrizio talks about it, the news is available immediately in Spain, Italy, France, Australia, wherever you want it to be. I can phone somebody at 12 o’clock here and by one o’clock my news is out there, all over the world. The way that social works also places the emphasis on certain pieces of information.
If we were in 2008 or so, transfer gossip was just a story and it took 24 to 48 hours to filter through the system. Now you can colour it with emotion and because it’s on social, people comment on it. Fabrizio and the like are commenting but being informative too. It’s a very potent weapon to have, is being used regularly and it will continue. Clubs use it as well.