The Archive

Steve Menary explores the growing number of transfer fees that remain undisclosed and the reasons behind it

Debate over the size of transfer fees is part of football, but an increasingly endangered part. Players now – certainly at lower levels – are increasingly sold for “undisclosed” amounts. Clubs, players and agents are within their rights to withhold the relevant figures but this trend is also short-changing fans.

AFC Bournemouth reputedly received £1 million from selling striker Danny Ings to Burnley recently, but the fee – like that of six other players sold over the past year – was undisclosed. Estimates suggest debt-free Bournemouth will eventually earn £3m but manager Lee Bradbury is bringing in free transfers and loans.

With club accounts repeatedly delayed, Cherries fans are split. Chairman Eddie Mitchell is either praised for righting a debt-laden ship or decried as an asset-stripper. The situation works in reverse too. Driven by an ambitious chairman, a club splashes out untold sums on players for undisclosed fees, then the chairman disappears as the club collapses. Those left picking up the pieces are often the fans, who – if transfer fees had been disclosed – could have queried their club’s spending much earlier.

Transfer fees are lodged with the FA and available in club accounts but the figures quoted are often an amalgamation, and few lower-league clubs voluntarily make any financial details available anyway. FIFA-licensed agent Faizal Khan explains: “To aid cash flow, it may be a transfer fee of £20m is paid in instalments over three years with a player in exchange and other benefits. The £20m deal may only be £7m in cash today and be made up of instalments, player bonuses, a high-profile pre-season friendly and lump sums after the player makes international caps to, in time, all add up to £20m.

“To not rock the boat, it is sometimes best not to disclose everything. If the selling club publishes that they sold a player for £20m yesterday and do not spend near £20m in that transfer window on replenishing the squad, some fans will go beserk.”

That creates pressure on managers and owners, but the most thick-skinned of the latter simply carry on regardless, particularly in the lower divisions where there is less focus. “Figures are reported in mainstream media and you get that figure from people close to the deal, like the buying or selling club or the agent,” says Nick Harris, chief sports news correspondent at the Mail on Sunday and editor of sportingintelligence.com. “Sometimes those figures are accurate, sometimes that are very wide of the mark. Premier League clubs will be scrutinised as more journalists are asking questions, but in the second or third division, if the local papers don’t have the will or the power and the owners don’t want people to know, there’s not a lot you can do.”

Since October 2010, clubs transferring players internationally must lodge details – including fees – with FIFA’s Transfer Matching System, which was used for 2,451 international transfers in the first transfer window of 2011. The combined transfer value of those deals was $320m (£197m) and FIFA estimate more than 4,000 clubs use a system that is bound by Swiss data protection laws and confidential.

With FIFA mired in allegations of corruption and the debacle of the failed England 2018 World Cup bid, there is an urgent need for more transparency in football. The Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) recently launched a campaign to make the game subject to the Freedom of Information Act. This, however, would only apply to governing bodies rather than clubs. “We haven’t got a policy on disclosing transfer fees, but it’s something most fans would want to see,” says Michael Brunskill, FSF director of communication.

The FA and Football League do not have policies on disclosure of transfer fees, while Premier League spokesman Dan Johnson says: “It’s down to individual clubs and some feel it is commercially sensitive so choose not to. Also, it’s sometimes a case that what the buying and the selling club wish to present are slightly different variations – adding in or not taking account of various clauses such as appearance, international or success payment triggers in the contract.”

Even the most blinkered fan must appreciate that disclosing how much money has been paid out or received during a transfer window is not conducive to good business. If a player is attracting interest from a club flush with cash from a big sale of its own, a bigger fee will be demanded.

In the longer term, annual disclosure of money spent during a season would at least give fans greater clarity on what is happening to their club and some of their money.

From WSC 296 October 2011

Footballers appearing on Desert Island Discs is a fairly rare occurance. Paul Brown examines what the lucky few chose

WSC is not alone celebrating a big anniversary this year. Desert Island Discs, the enduring radio fixture in which celebrity castaways get to choose eight favourite records, plus a book and a luxury item, is building up to its 70th birthday.

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Dermot Corrigan reviews a new film and its focus on young footballers chasing success and fortune in Europe

It is said that football can provide a route out of poverty, with FIFA often claiming that the game’s commercial revenues can “trickle down”. Soka Afrika, a new feature-length documentary which follows two young African players as they try to make it in European football, sets out to show another side to this story.

The film’s two subjects are well chosen. Ndomo Julien Sabo was playing youth football in Cameroon when a French agent persuaded his parents to mortgage the family home to “invest” in their son’s future. Brought to Paris, he trained in a clandestine network of camps around the city’s outskirts, playing trial games against other young imports.

When he got injured the agent disappeared, leaving 16-year-old Sabo completely alone and cold and hungry. He befriended fellow Africans sleeping rough and avoiding the police, and eventually managed to get back to Cameroon, but his parents were not overly happy to see him returning penniless. In Yaoundé he recovers his confidence and form, and returns to Europe better prepared for a professional career.

Ndomo’s story is cut with that of Kermit Erasmus, who was spotted by Feyenoord playing youth football in South Africa. This move went much more smoothly – at only 18 he is playing first-team games for satellite club Excelsior, showing off his fancy mobile phone to a former school-mate in a Port Elizabeth township and playing a football game on his big-screen TV in his nice apartment in Holland. He’s a cocky enough character but still likeable. We see him scoring three goals at the 2009 Under-20 World Cup in Egypt, but also struggling to make the step up with his club and the national senior team.

The film is stylishly put together by director Suridh Hassan and producers Simon Laub and Sam Potter, looking more like a relatively big-budget current affairs feature documentary than a typical fly-on-the-wall football film.

There are funky colourful credits and titles, an African drum-heavy soundtrack and edgy camerawork digitally filtered to bring out the greenness of Yaoundé and the greyness of Europe. The film-makers got great access, with the camera in the South African dressing room for pre-game team talks, on the touchline with openly unscrupulous agents at games in Cameroon and even with Sepp Blatter making a patronising contribution to a “Football for Hope” conference in South Africa.

The real star of the film is Jean-Claude Mbvoumin, a former Cameroon international who played club football in the 1990s in France before founding Paris-based NGO Culture Foot Solidaire. Mbvoumin describes the way promising young African players are brought to Europe as “child trafficking” and helps join the dots to make the film’s case.

Clubs and agents in both Europe and Africa, national football federations and under-age coaches, FIFA, even players and their families are all complicit in the system. Everyone involved knows the unwritten rules of the game. There is no surprise when Sabo is dropped from the Cameroon Under-20 squad as he cannot afford to pay the required bribe. “Corruption is everywhere,” Mbvoumin says. “I can’t say one country is more corrupt than others.” It would be better for everyone if African players stayed at home until they were ready – both in a footballing and personal sense – for the move to Europe he reckons.

Football for everyone in Soka Afrika is a means to get rich (or get by), not a goal in itself. Both Erasmus and Sabo really believe in the “rags to riches” possibilities. The film concentrates more on their concerns about making a living and building a career than training methods or tactics or trophies. We see a modern business structure feeding on the hopes of the resource and information poor. A few thrive and are successful, but many of those who make the big bucks are not the most deserving. The context could be any similar industry – perhaps fashion or music – where large numbers of talented young people with dreams are chewed up and spat out by the system.

Soka Afrika is produced by Masnomis and was screened in London during the Kicking & Screening Soccer Film Festival on September 23-29. For more information see sokaafrika.com

From WSC 296 October 201

Gavin Barber enjoyed seeing his son fulfil a childhood dream (for both of them)

Travelling on the Space Shuttle, appearing on Top of the Pops with my own synth band, playing for Ipswich: these were all ambitions that I had at various points during my childhood. Jimmy Savile heartlessly ignored requests to arrange the first two, and my lack of anything resembling football talent soon ruled out the latter. Which left me with one tantalisingly achievable alternative – to be the Ipswich mascot.

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The football world had a lot to say on the London riots. Paul Campbell believes not all of it was sensible

When the violence on the streets of north London began to spread across the country, it was inevitable that football would play a part in the discussion. Like most people, the football writer Ian Ridley watched the news and felt helpless. Unlike most people, however, Ridley thought that the game could somehow save the supposedly broken Britain.

“At times like these, you can feel helpless and peripheral in the sports pages, which always used to be known in newspapers as the toy department,” said a mournful Ridley in his Express column. “Maybe football can play its part in repair and healing, however. The thugs have won a battle. Let us hope they don’t, metaphorically, win the war… As the opium of the masses, it is far healthier than any liquid or substance. Or internet obsession.”

While Ridley bastardised the writings of Karl Marx, Henry Winter drew attention to the teachings of that other political heavyweight, Rio Ferdinand. Without sounding at all worried about the implications of his statement, Winter claimed that Ferdinand’s “voice certainly carries more resonance on inner-city streets than any politician’s”.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that those working in the football industry afford the game such importance. But it is a little concerning. Men who know a lot about kicking balls aren’t necessarily going to be great at constructing government policy, as Ian Holloway proved in the Independent. The Blackpool manager used his media platform to call for the rioters to stop smashing up shops and be more like Paul Scholes, “who went through his whole career without even a whiff of an off-the-field issue”. Holloway also pinned some blame on the media, arguing that “if the TV cameras weren’t there and we didn’t know about it I don’t think the rioting would have sparked up anywhere else”.

Holloway wasn’t the only football manager with an opinion. The Sun carried a double-page interview with a “sad, sickened and angry” Harry Redknapp, who blamed the riots on a breakdown in family values. “When I was 12 or 13, boys would meet their football manager dressed in a blazer or at least a pair of trousers. Now some of them turn up to see me wearing a pair of jeans with their arse hanging out. They just don’t care.” Stan Collymore called for help: “I want to know where the musicians, actors and rappers are at a time like this?”

With the great and the good of the football universe calling for action, it was left to a man still playing the game to offer some sense. David James, writing in the Observer, wondered how young people could relate to footballers at all: “While it is true that most of us have had a council estate upbringing, most now live away from those communities, enjoying a lifestyle that is light years from the kids we are talking about… Are people really going to listen to a millionaire footballer living in a plush mansion telling people who are struggling to make ends meet on a council estate to calm down?”

James went on to suggest that long-term engagement with a community would make more sense than taking a few seconds to type “Stop the violence” into a mobile phone. With this thought in mind it was heartening to see Peter Crouch and Benoît Assou-Ekotto involve themselves in the clean-up along Tottenham High Road. Football isn’t the opium of the masses and an involvement in the game doesn’t bring with it statesmanlike authority. But footballers, like everyone else, can help their communities most when they’re a part of them.

From WSC 296 October 2011