Friday.
Morning all. Hope you’re well etc etc. I know I’ve spoken about this before, but you kind of have to take your hat off to the people who continue to deal in transfer tittle-tattle. There’s almost something innocent about it, and fair play to them for trying as much as possible to maintain a pre-Covid 19 outlook on the market.
It’s pretty easy to ignore stuff on Twitter, but frankly if I see the name Thomas Partey one more time I’m going to lose my reason. For weeks, we’ve had updates about the Atletico Madrid midfielder, our supposed interest in him, his desire to come to England, his £50m price-tag, the fact that the President of Ghana spoke to his Dad who then told some random Twitter account via an Instagram DM that it was time to come to Arsenal or something. I mean, enough. It was time.
I think Tim Stillman put it very well:
Arsenal, who are out of the Europa League, 9th in the Premier League table, have just announced a £27m loss in their most recent accounts and negotiated a 12.5% paycut with their players, are DEFINITELY about to spend £50m on Thomas fucking Partey.
— Tim Stillman (@Stillberto) April 30, 2020
And that is just the tip of the financial iceberg. On the Arsecast this week I’m joined by Nigel Phillips of the Arsenal Supporter’s Trust to discuss a report they published this week about the impact of Covid-19 on the club’s finances. With a fair amount of certainty they predict that if the games for this season are played behind closed doors, we’d suck up a £19m loss on expected revenue.
Meanwhile, the expected income from season ticket holders, memberships etc that go a long way to keep things liquid during the summer months won’t happen because how can you renew tickets when you don’t even know when games are going to be played? Arsenal have outgoings of around £28m per month, plus there are other debts to service, including the money we owe to other clubs for players we’ve signed – as everyone knows these are payments staggered over time.
There are cash reserves, but those would dwindle fairly quickly, and Arsenal would be looking at using their emergency overdraft facility believed to be around £50m – enough to keep things ticking over for about two months. Basically, a huge revenue stream has gone in a flash, with nobody any the wiser as to when it might return. Then there are implications regarding broadcasting money, because you can be quite sure Sky and BT will be renegotiating the bollix out of their deals if there’s no football to show.
So, the idea that in this context, with players effectively being coerced into taking pay cuts by football executives who had no compunction in paying massive amounts of money to agents during the last transfer window (summer 2019), the idea that we’re going to spend tens of millions of pounds and all the associated fees that go on a new player is beyond absurd. And that works the other way too. While there might be a small number of clubs whose finances allow them to pick at the meat of others – like cash-rich, oil-baron, nation-state, oligarch vultures – there’s nobody going to be banging our door down to throw millions at the players we’d ordinarily like to move on.
The transfer market is dead.
RIP.
Or, you know, Rot in Hell, because there are practices and things about it that absolutely need to die a permanent death. Last year, the Premier League published a report which detailed the amount of money that clubs paid to agents. Liverpool were top of the league having dished out over £44m to third parties. Arsenal, meanwhile, were mid-table with around £11.2m going to agents.
Because of the business we did last summer, it was widely expected that Arsenal’s figure in this season’s report would be even higher. The £72m Nicolas Pepe deal was a club record, and a third party who was somehow necessary to complete a deal between two former Barcelona colleagues at the respective clubs apparently received a substantial 7 figure fee for his ‘work’. The were other arrivals, deals which on paper were a long way from being our biggest transfers ever, but what we officially spent and what we actually paid are two different things when you take agents fees into account.
Some will argue that’s just the way it works. That’s what you have to do to get deals done. And in our previous life that’s true. Transfers were like an industry within an industry, and while it’s ‘Not All Agents’ there are, what you might diplomatically call, sharp practices. When there’s the kind of money to be made that shifting big name players around generates, there are always going to be people looking to make their bit.
Just to clarify: I’m not suggesting that anyone has done anything illegal, but what this current situation does is allow us to look at the transfer market with some perspective. To step back and ask ‘Why is it like this?’, and perhaps ponder an alternative as and when football returns. That includes how players are traded, who benefits financially from the deals, and if there was a desire to do it, it should be possible to introduce a system of complete transparency so everyone can see where the money goes when transfers are made.
Right now, it’s too easy for too many people to move money around in ways which benefit themselves, not the clubs – and often not the players to the extent it should, they are the talent after all. Clubs are kind of beholden to the system that has become bloated and corrupted down the years, but perhaps one silver lining to what’s going on now is the chance to press the reset button on certain things and start again. The transfer market is one of the obvious ones for me.
Sure, there’ll be some people who don’t like it, who will resist it, and that includes agents, football executives whose relationships with people doing transfers is financially beneficial, and some club owners perhaps. Tough. We all want football back, we love and it miss it, but do we really want everything to go back just the way it was, or do we want something better?
These are increasingly difficult times for the sport, but let’s not be blind to the possibilities that exist to make improvements to the game for the benefit of many, and not the bank balances of a few.
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For more on the finances, and a great chat with Arsenal’s pitch-side man Nigel Mitchell, check out today’s brand new Arsecast. Listen, subscribe, share etc. Have a good Friday.
