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The reluctance of the winter transfer window, a sign of football in crisis

2021-01-29T10:02:01.498Z


After an already timid summer transfer window, the scarcity of transfers this winter testifies to the economic crisis which undermines football, at the risk of weakening small clubs and widening sporting gaps.


Three days before the deadline, Monday evening, no movement can support the comparison with the arrival last year of the talented attacking midfielder Bruno Fernandes at Manchester United, bought for 55 million euros from Sporting Portugal.

Many players have left on loan, a trend that is strengthening, from Moussa Dembélé (who moved from Lyon to Atletico Madrid) to Martin Odegaard and Luka Jovic, sent by Real Madrid to Arsenal and Frankfurt.

"It is not normal the number (low) of movements", noted the sports director of Marseille Pablo Longoria.

"It's a fairly drastic reversal of the situation, even more this winter than last summer", notes AFP Raffaele Poli, head of the CIES Football Observatory in Neuchâtel.

Fifa measured in 2020 the first erosion of international transfers for ten years (-5.4% over one year), linked to the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic on a sector with already fragile finances.

For clubs deprived of their ticket office behind closed doors, and faced with the decline in TV rights and their commercial revenues, "this is not the time to invest money that we do not have", summarizes the searcher. 

Martin Odegaard's first training session with Arsenal

Need cash

Because if the competitions have been able to resume since the total stoppage of spring 2020, the Covid-19 should darken the entire 2020-21 season, before a return to normal that no one dares to predict.

For European football, "the basic scenario relates to 6.5 to 8.5 billion euros" loss of earnings over the two combined seasons, said Wednesday Andrea Agnelli, boss of Juventus Turin and the European Union of clubs (ECA), without specifying the source of its data.

On the cash side, around 360 clubs need cash injections, whether in the form of debt or capitalization, for a total of 6 billion euros over two years, ”added the Italian leader.

However, "credit institutions are not very inclined to finance football," observes Raffaele Poli, and the need to resort to private funds makes "the cost of debt enormous for certain clubs".

In addition, the slowdown in transfers penalizes above all mid-table clubs and second-tier championships: in addition to ticketing, their economic model is based on the training or development of players transferred to more fortunate clubs. 

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Superleague and breeding clubs

With the erosion of revenues, their fixed charges now represent an increasingly disproportionate burden, inflated by the wage surge for ten years in European football.

Player salaries, which absorbed around 60% of club income before the pandemic, should rise this season to 76% in championships outside the Top 5 (England, Germany, Spain, Italy, France), predicted last July a ECA study.

But far from encouraging solidarity, the crisis pushes the leaders of the continent to secure their income, especially as some of them have lived for a long time beyond their means, like FC Barcelona and its abysmal debt.

Hence the return since October of rumors around a possible closed “Superleague” bringing together 15 to 20 major European clubs, eager for more income than those already provided by the Champions League.

At the same time, Raffaele Poli saw an increase in 2020 "in the possession by richer clubs of springboard or intermediate clubs, to control a larger pool of talent", as the galaxy of Red Bull clubs does for example.

City Football Group, which oversees Manchester City with Emirati and Chinese funds, added two clubs to its constellation last year - Lommel SK in Belgium and then Troyes in France - to control ten on four continents.

Read also

  • The transfer window live: Liverpool launches a seduction operation to attract Kylian Mbappé The European Super League project makes PSG "dream"

Source: lefigaro

All sports articles on 2021-01-29

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