Football transfer fees are unethical and out of control
Football transfer fees are unethical and out of control
The rank obscenity of elite football’s avarice should no longer be ignored
On Sunday, I watched three football matches on television. FC Tokyo versus Kashima Antlers was a bit of a bust for the most part, but the Old Firm derby and Manchester United against Liverpool were barnstormers.
They had ten goals between them, late drama and loads of controversy, but it’s in that controversy that the fly in the ointment appears. The guys in the back of the VAR surveillance van had their say, of course, but that’s to be expected.
What really took the edge off my enjoyment of these two ripsnortin’ derby matches was the extent to which the aftermath was inevitably dominated by talk of refereeing.
Were the big decisions in these games and others right or wrong? In most cases I think they were right. In others, I’m not so sure. That’s true of other games this past weekend too.
What I do know is that within five minutes of the end of the game at Old Trafford, I’d seen enough freeze frames to last a lifetime.
Is this really what football is supposed to be about?
Speaking of which…
Football transfer fees are unethical and out of control
The #AMF movement, which I assume still bubbles away somewhere beneath the ocean of awful Twitter accounts I’ve blocked just for existing, had its moment in the sun about a decade and a half ago.
It stood for ‘Against Modern Football’ and its overall thrust had some superficial appeal to me as a matchgoing, old-fashioned, Bovril-on-the-terraces sort of a supporter, but I never really felt drawn to it. I like football, and I like modern football. I wouldn’t bother otherwise. But it is true that it’s plainly and significantly flawed.
As much as I’m inclined to peer through the smoke of the back room in the football pub of nostalgia and blame the times for the failings of the modern game, I’m not sure the passing of years is the real problem. That assumes that the direction of football is an inevitable consequence of time going by. I’d like to think we have a little more agency in the matter than that.
Football alone is at fault for any perceived deterioration, just as it takes credit for its successes. Football is the problem with modern football. The entire global priority of the sport is out of whack, and while it has become a commercial success as well as a participation behemoth the world over, its size and power mean it should be answerable to standards outside itself.
Much of the dissent about modern football has its roots in our collective sporting ideals, our expectations of what sport should be. In their pure form, sporting contests should be competitive trials of physical strength and dexterity, battles of will and wit cocooned away from rules of the outside world.
The essence of sport is competition. No ifs, not buts. It’s the whole point and the only point, and it’s corruptions of competition that do serious damage to the fabric. Other consequences of time don’t get close. It’s important to acknowledge progress, to see where modern football has improved on what came before, but it’s hardly corinthian to ask whether we’ve strayed too far away from the sporting heart.
The ideal is lofty but the mechanics are simple. This weird little hobby of ours – 22 players, a patch of grass and a ball – appeals precisely because it is accessible. But, when you peel away the layers and look at the beautiful core, sometimes it’s only right to wonder whether football interacts with its surroundings in the right way.
In 2017, Paris Saint-Germain paid Barcelona a reported £198 million for Neymar. The following year, Kylian Mbappé cost them £163 million. They remain the two most expensive transfers in the history of football. Philippe Coutinho, João Félix, Enzo Fernández, Antoine Griezmann, Jack Grealish, Declan Rice and Moisés Caicedo have all moved for fees reported to be north of £100 million.
Add in Romelu Lukaku to make it a round number and half of the top ten fees were paid by Premier League clubs. Not coincidentally, they’re the five most recent. Let’s be absolutely clear about this: those are phenomenal amounts of money. Maybe they can be competitively or commercially justified, but let us not lose sight of the fact that these players are being traded for hundreds of millions of pounds.
Those are outliers, some of them politically motivated, others genuinely exceptional players wanted by rich clubs. Fees further down the food chain are really out of control. In the summer transfer window, Premier League clubs spent £2.36 billion on transfer fees.
Rice and Caicedo were among them, but the list reveals that massive transfer fees have become mundane. Take a step back and consider £77 million for Joško Gvardiol, or £64 million for Rasmus Hojlund, or £53 million for Christopher Nkunku. These are fine players, but that’s nearly £200 million.
The buying clubs in those cases were Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea. They all brought in multiple players at that kind of price and continue to do so. There is an issue of competitive balance in the sense that the very richest clubs can spend more on players than the rest (this all started as a sport, remember). But when we look outside football, the sheer volume of money flowing through it becomes ethically questionable.
There are few football hot takes more lukewarm than measuring transfer fees or player wages by the number of hospitals they’d build. Football is not society and society is not football, as much as they bleed into one another rather more than either would care to admit. This is the real world. That Neymar money was never going to mobilise an army of healthcare workers or police officers, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
If there’s a point at which football’s transfer market crosses a line into obscenity, we’re already far beyond it. The amount of money spent in each transfer window in the Premier League alone now is so colossal that it’s more valid than ever before to consider the right and wrong of football’s wealth as part of the broader economic situation. It can no longer be ignored.
Most football supporters don’t care. Some want their clubs to compete at all costs. Some marvel at the dizzying fees as part of the entertainment. Some just don’t care because why should they? They’re not wrong – there’s a different ethical limit for everyone and it’s not my place or anybody else’s to judge others based.
Large transfer fees are not new. Even Neymar’s move to France was seven years ago. A similar fee for Kaka was erroneously reported nearly a decade before that. Zinedine Zidane cost nearly £50 million as far back as 2001.
But the socioeconomic circumstances outside football are very different now, and it’s only fair to point a fresh spotlight at avarice and excess when many of us are facing the kind of financial struggles we haven’t dealt with before, without the safety nets previous generations might have had as a starting point. £200 million of football’s money might not actually be used to fix potholes, but it’s still a bitter pill when I look at my mortgage statement.
Ignoring or just not caring about massive transfer fees in football is one thing. Justifying them is quite another, and it’s clearer than ever that it isn’t really possible. There is too much money moving through football and it’s not a true economic process, just a black hole for nefarious soft power investment and competitive flexing.
Money – our money – goes into football and doesn’t come back out, at least not to the extent it should. It seems to me that this is something we should talk about a lot more than we do.
Whether its powerful acknowledge it or not, football has a responsibility to the world around it. It should be a positive influence and bring more to society than it takes away.
The powerful people within the game will never pursue that goal beyond the thinnest of lip service but as supporters and cultural participants, we also have a responsibility: to be more mindful of football’s position and role in the world, to demand better of our sporting institutions, and to look at the billions of pounds being spent in the name of football and decide whether we’re willing to be complicit.
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“It was a terrible decision. It is possibly the worst decision I have ever seen. If your knowledge and understanding of the game is really poor, you could reach the conclusion that is offside.
“If you are a Premier League official working at the highest level, I would be really disappointed if you thought that was offside. The only way that can be offside is if he stops Fabianski's ability to move or impedes his vision. Only the referee and VAR think that could possibly be offside.”
I get the impression Gary O’Neil wouldn’t like me very much.
Salty beef extracts
England’s flat start to Euro 2025 qualifying was a sign of familiar problem (i)
Emile Smith Rowe is a future England star – but he needs to leave Arsenal (i)
Everton is a grand old club, trampled into the ground by the actions of a few (i)
Football’s elite are tightening up – and Arsenal lead the pack (The Guardian)
Binning PSR off in favour of a 'luxury tax' would be the death knell for competition in the Premier League (Unexpected Delirium)
Dessert
My word, the adidas SPZL Pre-Spring 2024 Collection has plenty going for it.
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