A story about a hypothetical football club owner
Posted on February 1st, 2011 | 151 Comments |
Let’s assume you own a football club that you bought rashly, taking on more debt than you anticipated. Let’s also assume that you have some financial acumen and do a half reasonable job of bringing the wayward finances under control, although you make the mistake of thinking you know something about football too and make a few howlers of decisions in that respect during the first few years of club ownership.
Let’s also assume for the sake of agument that you have employed a managing director who seems to have no obvious uses.
Now, let’s assume that you’ve bank-rolled your club a fair bit more than excepected, particularly on the back of a season in the Championship. And let’s finally assume that you have a striker who’s a hot prospect and may just offer you a way to get your money back. The thing is, though, there are a few problems with getting rid of him.
First of all, you have a manager who has some integrity and would not be party to telling blatant lies about wanting to keep players when he knows you actually want to get rid of them. Secondly, the player himself is a local lad – a bit daft, but keen to play for his own club and already becoming something of an icon with the fans (possibly even wearing a revered shirt number of some sort).
Now you need to deal with these problems.
The first thing to do is to get rid of your principled manager in advance of the transfer window, so you sack him and bring in someone who’ll do as he’s told and has no scruples about saying things that aren’t true (such as, just for example, insisting the player in question is most definitely not for sale).
Now you need to make some plans but you also need to preserve your asset who would be better off out of the way anyway. So your send him off to the Middle East or the Arctic or somesuch under the pretence of some injury to keep him out of the picture while you put a few gentle feelers out to see what the market’s like for your asset.
You do have another problem too though – the fans. They don’t trust you and, even though you’re not keen on them, you need to at least make a cursory effort to look as if you’re appeasing them as they do, after all, contribute to your club’s finances on a regular basis.
So what you do is you make it look like you don’t want to sell the player, insisting he’s not for sale and rejecting the initial offers. By a happy coincidence this pushes the price of the player up too. At this point you adjust the gusset of your trousers quite actively in excitement.
Now it’s crunch time though. You get a great offer and you know you’re going to sell, but you still have to try and save a bit of face. The player – as has previously been mentioned – is a bit of a daft lad, so between you and his agent you manage to persuade him to hand in a transfer request, perhaps twisting his arm a bit here and there. You know you can’t actually make the player sign the transfer request but by dangling an extremely good weekly wage in front of him you can appeal to his greed.
“Hmm,” the player thinks. “I don’t want to go on principle but that is an awful lot of money and, well, I’m a bit daft so I’ll put in a transfer request like the boss says. I can always say I was forced, which is a bit true anyway.”
So your player hands in a transfer request and you ‘reluctantly sell’. Couldn’t have gone smoother, but you need to finish with a flourish.
You have of course left this all very late in the transfer window so that there’s little time to get anyone else in. That excuse has served you well with the fans before, so you use it again. However, just for a laugh you bid for a player who wouldn’t come to your club, from a club that’s owned by a man who hates your guts and wouldn’t sell to you anyway. Naturally your offer is turned down but, hey, you tried eh?
Pure fiction of course.
NUFCBlog Author: Hugh de Payen
I'm a baby-boomer of the punk rock persuasion, currently exiled in Somerset for crimes committed in a previous life where locals keep trying to poison me with something called 'scrumpy'. Hates sprouts, coat-hangers, Cilla Black, ornaments, Steven Seagull movies and 50 Cent (he's not worth 10).
Hugh de Payen has written 634 articles on this blog.
Redknapps comments are quite strange.
“Every time these clubs sell a player they seem to have to get the player to put in a transfer request to make it look like they did not want to sell him.”
Is he referring to both us and Sunderland. In my opinion, both incidents are almost identical. A club receives a great offer and a player is faced with a great opportunity, but the move is very controversial. That’s why the club and player work together publicly to ensure the deal goes through with both saving a little bit of face. However, Carroll’s texts going public clearly wasn’t part of the plan. It must be taken into account that the recipient of those texts was a Newcastle fan, so Carroll was always going to portray the situation in a certain light. Overall, there are three parties, two winners and one SHORT TERM loser. I will leave it up to you guys to who is who…
Also, apparently Carroll wanted to renew his contract after hearing of interest from Liverpool, but the club weren’t willing so he decided it best to leave.
This, to me, is total bo**ocks from the club. The player and the club have clearly engineered this move, but Carroll has not held his end of the bargain by keeping his trap shut. So now the club has been forced to retaliate. This could get quite ugly me thinks…