It used to be easy for rich Premier League clubs to bully smaller clubs into selling their best players. They all had different tactics -- Manchester United buttered up the selling club, Manchester City offered absurd fees indiscriminately,
Tottenham Hotspur made them sweat until deadline day -- but they consistently got their way from the transfer market's inception until now. Now the Premier League has a new TV contract, and the top clubs are slowly learning that their old tactics won't work anymore.
Selling John Stones or
Saido Berahino for a £20 million-plus ($30.8 million U.S., current exchange rate of £1 to $1.54) fee used to be a no-brainer for a club like
Everton or
West Bromwich Albion, who counted on big sales to have money to spend in the transfer market. With the cash they made from those sales, they could buy a replacement, plus upgrades at two more positions. No one liked to lose their best players, but it worked out just fine for everyone. Big clubs got the players they wanted, the players got the moves they wanted and the selling clubs got money to make their squad better.
This year, the game has changed. The Premier League's new TV deal doesn't kick in until next season, but the last increase, plus the guarantee of more money next season, has turned Everton and West Brom defiant. They're not just reluctant sellers anymore, but outright refusing to sell Stones and Berahino at any price. Both players have handed in transfer requests, meaning they'll forego any bonus payments due to them if they make a move, and they're still not getting their way. Everton chairman Bill Kenwright and West Brom chairman Jeremy Peace insist that they will not sell their stars, for any reason, or at any price.
The
transfer window doesn't shut until next week, so the chance still remains that they're bluffing and will end up taking the money after they've had a few days to line up replacements. But even if they do, the paradigm of English soccer has still shifted significantly -- when a player submits a transfer request, clubs that aren't filthy rich or in Champions League usually accept that they have to negotiate. West Brom and Everton haven't done that. Even if they do want the money, they're certainly not afraid of missing out on it.
Welcome to the new normal in the Premier League: mid-table clubs refusing to sell their best players at a price anyone would consider to be reasonable. It could create a league that's extremely competitive, with everyone who stays in the Premier League for more than a year or two possessing legitimate stars who could play for any team in the league. Pretty cool, right? Well, maybe.
This should be the immediate effect of the Premier League's TV money boom. The clubs that have developed great players themselves will be able to keep them, their teams will be better for it and the quality of play in the average Premier League game will go up. But long term, most teams will lack a deep pool of talent to develop.
All of the top teams in the Premier League have invested a significant amount of money in their facilities and youth coaching, and are developing players in-house. But no matter how good of a job these clubs do at developing their own talent, they're always going to need to fill in the gaps. If you want to win the Premier League or Champions League title, you're going to need to find some of the best talent from all around the world -- even Barcelona, with the most famous youth academy in the world, can't reasonably aspire to have more than three or four homegrown players in their starting 11 at one time. The Premier League and European competitions both have rules requiring a squad to have a minimum number of homegrown players, and developing eight squad players entirely in-house is an extremely difficult thing to do.
Rich clubs complete their squads by buying the best homegrown players from smaller clubs -- Stones, Berahino, etc. -- and they're willing to pay more to sign them than an equivalent player from another country because of their homegrown status. But even
Chelsea, with all their revenue and Financial Fair Play leeway, have a breaking point. They might be willing to pay £10 million more for Stones than an equivalent foreign player, but £20 million more? At some point, it stops making sense.
So if the West Broms and the Evertons of the world won't sell their best players at any price approaching reasonable, the question becomes: How does Chelsea and the rest of the top six fill in the gaps? They still have a lot of money to spend and they still have a need for additional homegrown players.
The answer is probably going to be buy younger, buy from lower-division clubs. Chelsea already do this to an extent, snapping up lots of talented youngsters and loaning them out until they're ready for the first team or clearly not good enough, but they might start doing more of this in-country. The rest of the Premier League's rich clubs will probably do the same.
Some of the new TV money is trickling down to lower divisions and grassroots soccer, but certainly not enough for those clubs to resist selling their top 16-year-olds for seven-figure sums. And while Everton say Stones is priceless, there probably is an offer somewhere south of jaw-dropping that they'd accept for 18-year-old top prospect Ryan Ledson.
If 21-year-old stars from mid-table clubs used to cost £5-10 million more than a foreign equivalent, but now cost something closer to £20 million more -- or are simply not for sale -- it would not be surprising to see big clubs taking the approach that they need to start spreading their money around. Instead of spending £40 million on Berahino, why not spend roughly £4 million per player on 10 top teenage prospects? If your scouting is good enough, chances are more than one of them turns out to be an excellent squad player for your team, even with the unpredictability of teenagers.
When a Stones or Berahino cost £15-20 million, it was a solid value proposition for Spurs or Chelsea. It's fairly expensive for someone who isn't a star yet and might never be one, but it's low-risk. They are almost guaranteed to be a decent player; you might sign 10 kids and get nothing at all. But when you double that price, those players suddenly become more risky than teenagers.
In the first summer after the new TV deal was announced, no one really understood how the transfer market would look operate. Now they know: the days of bullying mid-table clubs into selling their players at a reasonable price are over. Next summer, the big clubs will probably take a new approach: younger, cheaper, lots of bodies instead of a small number of "sure things." They will get some of these players from clubs like Everton and West Brom, but more of them from lower division teams. The result will be the gutting of young talent from the Football League and fewer Champions League opportunities for young players who have already proven themselves at the highest level.
This will overload the academies of a select few teams with tons of talent. Some of those players will make it at the top level and some will sign with lower division clubs again after being released. The players in the middle will get sold for no loss or a profit to the Evertons and West Broms of the world, because about five years into this process, they will have way more money than they have talent coming through their ranks and they won't have any idea what the hell happened. So instead of giving Everton lots of money, like they tried to do this summer, Chelsea will spread their spending out among more clubs, then eventually make money off Everton because of it.
If you're a proponent of the creation of a European or global super league and the marginalization of average clubs, hooray for you! It looks like we're slowly but surely trending in that direction. If you're someone who thinks every club matters and the current league systems need to be preserved, with the lower divisions strengthened, we're sorry. A TV deal that Kenwright and Peace are making to look like a great equalizer at the moment is probably going to lead to the gutting of dozens of youth teams, including their own.
Welcome to a dystopian future where English players have no future unless they join a huge club as a teenager or hold out for a free transfer. By refusing to sell their top assets, Everton and West Brom might end up breaking football.
