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Adam Leventhal
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It's tumultuous. It's wild. The transfer window. Twice a year in January and the summer, the football trading ecosystem kicks into gear and the game's landscape changes. Deals are done around the world. Millions pass between clubs as they trade star names or players they just don't want anymore. It's a roller coaster. There's so many ups and downs. But what goes into doing a transfer deal? How does it work? In what order does everything happen? From the Athletic, I'm Adam Levental. Come with me behind the scenes at training grounds, stadiums and offices to unpick the complexity of a transfer covering all the angles in the process. The player I had that month to get my head around, right, listen, I'm going to be moving manager. Things can really change on an hourly basis. Scouting. Being quick in recruitment is vital. The decision makers, that's my job, to create a situation where everybody feels like they're getting. Getting 70% of what they want. Agents. The window itself is not the greatest window to work in. It's full of panic. Lawyers, usually the hard yards are done in the more inconspicuous places. And doctors. The medical was the really kind of pinnacle moment. This is the Athletic FC podcast. Welcome to the anatomy of a transfer. So I'm on my travels speaking to the people involved in this ongoing transfer market. And I wanted to start with a little pep talk with a man who breaks so much of the news on the Athletic. And there he is. It's David Ornstein and co by the looks of it. Let's go and talk to him. Welcome. How are you? Yeah, good, thank you. This is Adam. Hello, Sparky. I was going to take my shoe off. Sparky, hold on. So I'm going on this journey. I'm speaking to the key stakeholders in the transfer process and this is something that you are immersed in. How do you see the jigsaw puzzle fitting together of the key people in this process? Really appreciate you taking the time and it's a pleasure to sit down with you and talk about it. We're also joined here by my dog Sparky, who is privy to most of my Conversations relating to transfers. He knows all the secrets. The transfer world is crazy. It's insane. On the one hand, a sort of joy of my career and on the other the bane of my life and certainly that of my family. There are key players throughout the process, so recruitment departments, their managers, their coaches, their executives, their directors, the atmosphere created by their fans, the requirements of the team that ultimately is where things stem from. And then it, it spreads. They have to do their due diligence. They have to go out and watch players hold conversations with agents, with intermediaries, with family members, do their due diligence on the players themselves. Basically spying on them and finding out how they live and how they work and their traits and their characteristics, their behaviors. And then there are others who play significant roles in these because players certainly at the elite level these days, they have commercial people around them, they have medical people around them, they have lawyers and financial advisors. There's so many different elements to a football player that much of that then bleeds into the transfer ecosystem. Okay, more from David and Sparky probably later on on breaking a transfer story, but I'm clear on the seven stage order. We need to do this player scouting, manager, agent, boardroom, lawyers and medics. So let's kick on, let's get started. To a match. So this is where the story starts at a football ground and perhaps the most important element of the transfer business, what a player does on the pitch in matches. They're out there to impress the fans, the manager, the bosses in the director's box of the team. They're playing for first and foremost to deliver moments to remember. Maloney takes. And it's in. It's Ben Watson. Is Ben Watson for Wigan Athletic. They've surely won the FA Cup. Hi, I'm Ben Watson, former Premier League player and scorer of the winning goal in the FA Cup Final 2013 for Wigan Athletic. You're a part of history forever. It's something that no one can ever take away from you. Not only winning the FA cup, but to score, the winner is the best players in the world. Some of them haven't done that well. Ben Watson had a 19 year professional career, including that amazing moment at Wembley with Wigan. He went on to score in the Europa League the following season as well. He also played for Crystal palace and Watford in the Premier League. He made six transfers during his career, including three in January. The first one, moving to Wigan was. I wanted to leave at that time because I felt it was a right time for me to leave Palace. They had offered me a New deal, but I wanted to go and play in the Premier League. And then going from Wigan to Watford again. New manager come in, Malky Mackay. And I'd just come back from injury and he was honest with me and I fully accepted that. And then moving from Watford to Forest was, that was a tough one at the time because I was told I could leave in the summer. Marco Silva come in, he said, you're not leaving, I want to keep you. Which I was more than happy to stay. And then he left and then I don't think the manager had any control over what was coming in and going out. So it was above the manager and you know, that one was, you know, tough to take but that happens. And I was open minded and again I was, you know, 32 at the time and, and got a fantastic move to Nottingham Forest in January. It's even tougher than the summer because it can be, it literally can be overnight and I think from experience that was my case. It was literally one day you're at the football club, the next day you're the other end of the country and you're signing elsewhere. Whether sometimes you want to do that or you don't want to do that, sometimes it's taken out of your hands. You could be easily distracted in, in them windows because I've seen it over the years with players and there might be a little bit of interest but there's no concrete interest. And that can play with players minds as well. The thinking of they think something's going to happen. They've heard a rumor of X, Y and Z, like me. But the reality is until that club or gets in contact with your club to say, right, we want to do this, then everything's just whispers. And like I say, I tried to just completely sort of blank that all out, concentrate on football. And then you know, once sort of them phone calls happened then I knew right, now it's business. This, this, this could happen. Agents ain't magicians, they're not, you know, you can't just pull something, a rabbit out of the hat and go right, you will get a move to where you deserve to be moving to due to your performances on the football pitch. So that brings us the next element. Players move because there's someone watching from another club and they quite like the look of what they see. And those who work in scouting and recruitment for rival clubs predominantly carry out their work in one of two ways. Here at matches, they're quite easy to spot. They're usually alone, sats in or around the Directors or press box, keeping a low profile, holding a team sheet, scribbling a few notes down, then often scampering down the stairs and out of the ground once they've seen enough before the game's even finished. They also do a lot of work sat like this in front of their computers, analyzing games from around the world on various scouting platforms and all the important data that underpins players performances. But what are they looking for? Well, someone who can tell us all about the process is Leonardo Gabanini, who was chief scout at Tottenham, helped bring in the likes of Mickey van der Ven Vicario and Pedro Porro two summers ago. I can tell you my model. It's really, really simple. I have five different steps. So my first step is scouting coverage, highlighting the debuts squad, planning a priority position for upcoming markets, just to prepare all the scenarios for the market. Step two is in depth scouting analysis, cross checking targets, benchmarking technical and physical data across other targets, but also the players you have in house for a comparison. After prepare videos and presentations for the head coach or the owner. Because this is something that in England is important for me, communication and alignment is key. Make your selection. Step four is speak with the board members to get confirmation of what is actionable. What we can do, the step five is the medical checks, what type of injuries he had in the past. You can establish if this is the right guy for you or no. The other part is the psychologist. We need to check the game and after we can check the social media and try to understand the profile of the player. For me, the player must be open to improve. This is my method. Okay, so that's Leonardo's five steps from deep analysis in scouting through to extra work around psychology. We'll have more on the data side of things to come. But whilst we're in Italy, a quick history lesson from our Italian football writer, James Horncastle. Italy invented calcium medicato. That means the football market as the kind of popular phenomenon that we have I think come to much later than they did in part because used to have this thing that happened on transfer deadline days where all of the clubs would get together in one hotel and they would essentially jostle and basically throw paperwork over like kind of an office brew in order for it to be sort of done in time. So this was already part of like Italian film in the 1980s. The transfer market was something to be kind of laughed at and kind of really captured the popular imagination. And then sort of through the late 90s into the early 2000s, you had them inventing A new type of journalism, which is the journalism that is so popular now, which is transfer journalism. Some of the people who I think we have to thank for that, Gianluca Di Marzio, whose father was a football coach, a football executive, so he very much grew up around football, be it players, managers, agents, sporting directors, and became kind of most connected person in Italy. So connected that they have this fantastic nightly show during the transfer windows in Italy called Cacio Mercato Lo Originale, which is a talk show, it's a culture show because they usually go somewhere. They go like to the Dolomites or more recently they've been in Siena and sort of Dimazio is out and about talking to people from the city of the region that they're in, whilst also dropping transfer bombs. Fabrizio Romano used to work under Dimazio at SKA Italia. And Fabrizio, I suppose, began tweeting in English, tweeting about stories that were not just Italy related and became the kind of global phenomenon that Fabrizio Romano is today. So I think the Italians are responsible for a lot in this world, but they are very, very responsible for our consumption of this kind of football journalism. Well, speaking of pioneers, let's get back to Leonardo Gabanini. He used to work for the Pozzo family, whose video scouting room at Siri a side udinese in the 1990s was trailblazing before Wyscout and other platforms. They videoed on VHS cassette tapes all of the games around the world to help their scouting network get ahead of the market. Fast forward to now. And data analysis is a huge part of the recruitment business. In addition to watching games live or online rather than videotapes, here's Leonardo's approach. We need to go on the hybrids between the eyes and between the data. Everybody fighting between the data and the experience. I always had a senior scout, maybe two senior scout because if you consider how many players they saw in his career now is incredible. The data guy are amazing. They are able to see five, six games per day. The data guy must be informed about the scouting department. In my opinion, in the. In the 2025, the data guy must go to see the games in the weekend because they need to see the. The different speed, the different situation, the different perception on the eye. The quantity of data they can collect is so important that we need to work together. Many sporting director telling me that ah, do you think that this guy is good? I will put this in the system and I will let you know if you are right or no, no, please No, I don't agree about that. Now with the data, we are more sure that we can do the right choice. Well, speaking of data, it's central to Brentford's model. Their owner Matthew Benham's algorithmic approach has seen them punch above their weight for four seasons in the Premier League. Here's their technical director, Lee Dykes. If you've got a good data model, which we have, I think it's one of the best. It helps you fill up the process very quickly. And being quick in recruitment, especially from Brentford's perspective, and being efficient is vital not just to get in players, but also to getting the best deal possible. The coolest thing about the day is it's Matthews, so it's unique. We don't share it with another Premier League club. So there's a marginal gain opportunity there for us because we're using the the numbers our way. A lot of people that say they have data is correct, but a lot of the time it's a shared resource. So where's the marginal gain there? We'll filter the process through data and then we'll get some top subjective eyes on the players that are flagged up. So you start looking at players, obviously, then the eyes see different players and it's about just finding out what's fitting the criteria that we've set in each position. It becomes very subjective then. So them guys will then put them on their top four, top six players per position, they'll submit a document every month and then the best players are obviously seen by myself and other key members in the department. And then we start to escalate the process. Eventually we'll identify maybe the top three players in the priority positions. We'll get the coaches involved and then that's where myself, Phil and Thomas will work really close together to try and find out who the best available players are. And in the background you constantly. My job is to check the agent information, financially, where is it at and give a good guesstimate in that direction and constantly check if it's doable because you might have started this process in September. And all the time, as soon as we start a process on a player, sometimes they all of a sudden score a hat trick or a Weldy goal and the price goes up. And you know, me and Phil always have a laughing joke, but when we get to a certain level on a player, they're guaranteed do something special. Next, on the anatomy of a transfer, where does the manager or head coach fit into this? I'm very comfortable having real honest upfront conversations with players. We talk brokering a deal with an agent. If agents didn't exist, I think the clubs would run riot. And it's not just the footballers themselves affected by these moves. And I remember one of wives, she just, she was so depressed. Whether you're ordering wings for the game, whipping up a seven layer dip, or ordering pizza, there's something about football that makes you want to eat. And this football season, Ubereats has the best deals on game day food no matter what you're craving. From two for one pizza to buy one get one wing. Uber Eats will be dropping new deals each week all season long. Uber Eats official On demand delivery partner of the NFL Order now. Terms and conditions apply. See Ya app for details. You know what's smart? Enjoying a fresh gourmet meal at home that you didn't have to cook meat. Factor your loophole in the laws of mealtime. Chef crafted meals delivered with a tap, ready in just two minutes. You know what's even smarter? Treating yourself without cheating your goals. Factor is dietitian approved, chef prepared and you played it pretty smart, huh? Refresh your routine and eat smart with factor. Learn more@Factor Meals.com this is the Anatomy of a Transfer, a special episode of the Athletic FC podcast with me, Adam Leventhal. So we've talked about player performances, getting noticed by scouts. We'll deal with the role of a manager next. But first let's get Seb Stafford Blaur's German perspective. I think what's interesting is the behavior of the German football clubs themselves because a lot of them tend to do their business early and in advance and tend to be quite forthcoming about what they're trying to do. And so whilst you do see yellow ties and live news ticker on Sky Deutschland and you see kind of the live blogs, a lot of the big drama tends to be drawn from abroad, so they'll report on big Premier League sagas. For instance, because of the finances in the Bundesliga, with the exception really of Bayern Munich and occasionally British Dortmund, there aren't many of those deals that get the pulses racing and so it doesn't command the same sort of circus. Meanwhile, it can feel a bit like a circus for a manager in England dealing with the press whilst part of the recruitment process behind the scenes. Let's speak to Burnley head coach Scott Parker, formerly of Fulham, Bournemouth and Club Bruges. I think firstly, I'm always one that wants to try and be very transparent and very honest at the same time. Always very mindful of obviously the the situation how delicate these situations are. And even players that you're in close contact with or clubs that you're negotiating with, things can really change on an hourly basis. So until that player, out of respect for the player, out of respect for the club that own that player, is not something that really I would be. I would want to be engaging in. And how have the models differed in the managerial jobs that you've had? Fulham was, was different. Fulham was very data driven. Fulham had software and a model that was data driven to a number that obviously certain players that we could sign and certain players not Bournemouth wasn't so much like that. That was just experience of the people who are in and around it here. I think it's probably a bit of a mix of both. Ten years ago, I don't think anything was really driven by data. It was mainly driven by live scouting. And probably now there's probably a little bit of a hybrid where here certainly where there's data which we use to confirm certain things and then there's obviously scouting and recruitment and just the, shall I say, the old schooler way of looking at players to recruit and we focused on bringing players in. But how do you find letting players go difficult? That's a very difficult part because there's a human side to that and there's a professional working side to it. I'm very comfortable having real honest upfront conversations with players. One which is maybe, look, you're not going to be figuring as much and I think it's best for both sides that we part or certainly you move on. And at the same time, the tough conversations which are challenging are the ones where maybe a player's not been in and around it as much, not had a lot of game time, but you as the coach still want them as a manager. You sit there thinking, look, I really don't want this, this one to go. I'm one injury away and he's in the team. Let's say then words become a little bit weaker as a coach because these are. Every player wants to play and they want game time. Yeah. And I guess you've got a good understanding of that side of things too, as you experience big moves as a player. Charlton to Chelsea, then Newcastle, West Ham, Tottenham and Fulham. How did you deal with it? I think the first one was probably the hardest. I think the Charlton to Chelsea was very, very difficult for me. I was at a young age, it was quite volatile. The actual process of that was very, very difficult. I was going into an environment where Chelsea at that time with abramovich was spending a lot of money and it was a squad full of world class players. So I had two children at the time, albeit I moved from Chow on to Chelsea, so it's not exactly a million miles apart, but obviously had to move. And these are all things in terms of transfers which are. Are very draining on a player and I don't expect the violins out in any stretch here. As a player, you go into work every day, you train with a group of lads and with a team, and it's probably your families or your wives and your kids who have had to change school again in the space of six months or a year. And these are the demands, I suppose, of transfers for players, really? Yeah. Well, it was interesting what Scott said there about the impact on families and it reminded me of this Instagram video that went viral a couple of years ago. You may remember it. No food. No, no. It's former Premier League player Mark Hudson telling his kids he got a new job as the Cardiff assistant manager. Not what then having been promoted to manager, he has to tell them when he's no longer the boss. We will go to dinner tonight and we'll all pack up tomorrow. And it brought home the realities and the unpredictability for those close to players. Let's go and meet the person who filmed that video. I'm Mary Louise and I am wife of Mark Hudson, who was a previous player and now is in the coaching managing side in the premiere Premier League. Now, I videoed, obviously, the reaction at the beginning. I never even thought that I would be videoing the conversation when he did actually lose his job, because a lot of people see the ups, but they never see the downs. What is it like in general being married to a footballer? It's a roller coaster. There's so many ups and downs. There's a lot of sacrifice, both personally, professionally and emotionally. Yeah, it's hard work. It's hard work. That's the life of a partner of a footballer. Sometimes whatever's happening in your life, you do have to leave it behind because the footballer's moves take priority. Right? Yeah, they come first. And that's a conversation that we've only kind of talked about, I'd say, in the last couple of years. And that probably goes back to the sacrifice. And it's a very bitter pill for Mark to swallow. For him to say that his job categorically comes first above everything. At the moment. It's extremely hard for him being away and seeing us once a week. The people that you have met who are Partners and wives and girlfriends, et cetera. What have you learned from them in terms of the sacrifices that they have had to make? I keep in touch with a lot of the players, wives that I've met over the years and I remember one of the wives, she just. She was so depressed. She just. Just wanted to move back home. She was like, I hate where I live. I haven't got any friends. This is just horrible. I've seen several of my friends become in those positions and some, some of them, majority of them have moved back home because they're just like, I don't fit in here. I want to go back home. I've had enough now. Football fans and journalists get very excited about the transfer window. When you hear those two words, transfer window, what does it mean to a wife or a girlfriend of a footballer? I was nervous as a wife. You'll know things that other people won't know. You'll know things that the media don't know, that fans don't know. You'll know what their time's been like for the last six months. You'll know the struggles, the injuries, the ups and downs, you'll be knowing. So you kind of almost prepared. We didn't know whether Mark was going to go to this club. This curve, this curve. And just before midnight, obviously he signed Huddersfield. We didn't even think Huddersfield was going to happen. It was going to be some other club. And it's the nervousness, like, you know it's going to happen, you just obviously don't know where you're going to end up. It's almost like a lottery, isn't it? And it's like, oh, God, I wasn't expecting that. Oh, God, really gotta move over there, have we? Okay, thankfully it was. It, you know, it worked out for the best. But, yeah, transfer window, you know what's coming. Unless something, you know, just suddenly happens and they just go, surprise. Actually, we changed our mind. This is actually gonna happen. But then you have to deal with it, you have to pick. But then, yeah, you're the one that has to pick up the pieces. Because is when I think that's the other thing as well, isn't it, when transfer window happens. Mark spent a whole evening driving around England and literally just went to Huddersfield and was like, right, I'm in the training tomorrow, so can you just sort out the rest? And it's like, yeah, don't worry, I've got this, like, don't worry. Yeah, that's fine. I find the house, I find the schools, I find the nursery, I find another babysitter. Yeah, it's tying that whole bag up and moving it to somewhere else. And you do kind of get to a point. I remember when I got to Leeds and I was just like, I don't anybody here. But the reality for the unsung heroes is a little bit more logistical rather than it's all logistics. We've got nothing else. I'm super planner now. I am a pro mover. That's what Mark actually says about me. He's like, you've got it, you've nailed it, you've nailed this move. It doesn't faze me. If anything it cleanses my life moving because I get rid of so much stuff. You know, people spend their whole lives in their houses and they never clear out anything. You know, I've decluttered my house. God knows how many. I think. How many houses have done. I think it was 13. Wow. That's normal in football, but it's not normal every day anywhere else. No, I don't think so. Well, it's great to have a cup of tea with Mary Louise and luckily enough, a short walk around the corner. Some agents, the essential next part of putting a deal together, are gathered and whilst I head there, Paul Bayous in Spain, it's over to you. There are many elements that make transfer windows in Spain sort of different compared to other countries or big leaks in the wall. Besides Barcelona and Real Madrid or La Liga clubs are mostly sellers. They try to make the best out of the assets they have and then rebuild. That makes that most of the teams work with late timings and waiting for the best opportunities to emerge in final days of the transfer windows. Then there is also a bigger culture around the gossip, fueled by the fact that everybody talks in Spain. People love chit chatting and that includes senior executives in the industry. If you add that to the fact that Spanish football is filled by loud characters. I'm thinking about Javier Tibas or Joan Laporta now. But there's been plenty of examples with the Spanish club president in the 90s and beyond. Then you have an explosive mix here. Finally there's the media environment as well. The type of coverage. Reporters waiting at the doors of clubs, headquarters, others following executives to restaurants where they have private meals. This is quite common here in Spain, a country as well, where the radio is a much consumed mass media and their night prime time goes from 11pm to 1am in that time slot, every big radio station in the country have their own late night sports show which are basically three hours to discuss about football and whatever sport is on the news that day day. All this has boosted that culture of frantic deadline days, crazy last minute deals and live coverages of what goes on in every Spanish club. Okay, well, I'm now at the offices of Sports Management Agency, General Sports Worldwide. They have hubs here in the UK and the US and the noise that you can hear behind me is their football department. Agents, data and analytics mentors heading into the boardroom for an important meeting to look ahead to the final stages of this January transfer window. And they've kindly allowed me to join them. Let's go and have a listen. Basically, I think the meeting, we will agree we've got 12 days to the end of the window. I think the purpose today is to really sweep up what has to be done. If you just want to kick on, we can then just have a chat about. Yeah, where are stew, you. You've got a couple of interesting pieces at the moment on our friend up in Scotland and. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I think let it play out and then let's see, we've got quite a few options. Quite amazing really. I mean it's all over the world. A couple from America, Denmark, Belgium. Yeah. Mark Gottlieb, I'm managing director of talent of General Sports Worldwide, which I'm fundamentally overseeing the football division. I've been in the business of football agency on and off for probably 25 years. What we are looking at is going through our client list of 70 plus players and those that may or may not need some push from us or from a club situation in this window. So the window itself is not the greatest window to work in. It's fairly chaotic because of circumstances that we're not in control of. But league positions, managers getting sacked, classic manager gets sacked, new manager comes in, I don't like him, he's not going to play, he's got to move on. We might get a phone call, you've got to get him out. So you're getting these requirements which are urgent. The bottom line though to this is, as we say to our clients, your performances create your market. As an agent, we can ring up every club in the world and put your name forward. What we actually want is your performances dictate that a market has created. You're consistently performing above and beyond. And the phone rings. When you tell people that you're a football agent, what do they think you are as opposed to what you are? They think we earn too much money, they think we take money out of the game. We are parasites the truth is we're not. We are part of the ecosystem. We are valuable to clubs. We work with clubs. You know, we go and meet clubs all the time and we have good relationships and our job is to assist our clients to hopefully, hopefully have the best career they can have. There are some seriously good agents out there that do it the right way, have integrity, build trust with their clients, and I believe we're part of that. It isn't all about money, of course, we are not a charity, but at the same time it's tough out there. So what are the secrets to a successful negotiation? Would you say a successful negotiation really ends up as a compromise? You're never going to get exactly what you want and the club isn't going to exactly get what they want. But I think more important than the money is if the player is performing well. The contracts do tend to take care of themselves to a point. We will fall out with clubs on a deal, but we won't fall out long term. So we'll fall out and have a disagreement, we'll shake hands and we'll go again another time. Because at the end of the day, we have to do what's best for our client, not for the club. That's not really why we're here. You know, if agents didn't exist, I think the clubs would run riot. How much money does an agent earn in a typical deal? There is no secret that as goes into the numbers, we're actually earning 5% of guaranteed income. The larger the deal. Yes, those numbers look more from our point of view. There are many deals in League 2 that actually we don't earn money, which is fine. But you know, if we've got a League 2 player that can grow into a championship player and beyond, then we're happy. So no, it's not all about, you know, we do a deal once or twice a year, then we go away and sit in the sun. We work hard, we work 24 7. You can ask my wife. Getting a deadline day deal is not straightforward and it can go right up to the wire. And it is for an agent who is spinning those plates because there's four different partners. There's us, there's the selling club, there's the buying club, and most importantly, our client. Yeah, we're managing people's expectations, so it's not for the faint hearted. Coming up on the final part of the anatomy of a transfer, the decision makers step into the process. Once you've sold a player and your pockets are bulging with cash, as people might perceive it. It's very difficult then to negotiate on bringing a player in. Those that analyse the contracts, negotiations are fraught with difficulty and carry out the all important medicals. The players are obviously incredibly valuable assets and the last thing we want to do as a player to be injured in their first few welcome back to the Anatomy of a Transfer Going through the complex process of how transfers actually happen. We've got three more stages to learn about, including the decision makers. Next, I've got two people I need to meet, but first to the States. They've got the club World cup this summer, the World cup next year, and Americans own clubs left, right and centre in England, don't they? But what happens in the MLS transfer market? Jeff Reuter what makes a transfer window quintessentially American? Well, for starters, any player over the age of 35 who's done something wonderful in their career is bound to be linked to a club in Major League Soccer these days. More realistically, however, the flipped nature of MLS season, which takes place from late February through early December, makes it very difficult to negotiate with clubs from abroad whose seasons fall from, let's say, August to May. An MLS offseason is going to fall in the middle of the European calendar, which will make it very difficult for a selling club to move on from a player that they have in their starting lineup that might be coveted by an MLS club. Simultaneously, there are some league specific rules that make it difficult to discuss Major League Soccer transfers if you aren't a close study. The winter window is quite long. Registration begins on January 31st. Roster compliance falls the day before the season kicks off this year, that's February 21st and it will run until mid April, with the summer window opening in mid July and closing about a week before the European transfer window closes in August. There are player drafts that you will hear about as well, much like the NFL and the NBA, but they aren't nearly as important now that Major League Soccer has robust academies for each of its 30 active clubs. Usually these players who are drafted will will fall in roster slots 24 through 30 rather than becoming a headline member. In recent years, since Lionel Messi signed in the summer of 2023, Major League Soccer has been easing the restrictions and roster rules that accompany the competition. So hopefully part of the Messi effect will make it a little bit easier to discuss. Follow and frankly, if you're a club, navigate the global transfer window. Okay, Brighton's Paul Barber, who actually has previous experience of working in mls, has agreed to have a chat with me In a bit. But I'm here now at the home of Queen's park rangers from England's second tier, the Championship, to meet one of the youngest CEOs in the game who also has a link to the States. My name is Christian Ori. I'm the chief executive at Queenspark Rangers. So you're 28? Soon. Soon. Where has this experience come from? Why are you sitting there? My last job was as managing partner of a business called Rotexo, which was a US based business that largely worked with North American ownership groups that were looking to acquire football clubs, helping them to negotiate to acquire those football clubs and then ultimately then helping them to structure the football club in the best possible way to lose as little money as possible and win as much as possible. That's very much been what ultimately led me to being fortunate enough to be asked by the ownership here whether I'd be interested in joining qpr. Do you enjoy being immersed in a transfer window? Because I'm sat here in this office, it seems very calm. Last January we signed three players on deadline day and the training ground people were running around a bit. I'm not going to pretend it's all cool all the time. It's definitely not. But if you have a clear plan agreed between the, in our case, head coach, assistant coach, head of recruitment of what you want to do, then you have something very clearly, identifiably to check your progress on every day. Right. Which is we like this player in this position. We think this will be the perfect time in the window or the most like the least bad time in the window to try to get this deal done. If you have a timeline that can give you some sense of ease across the club, accepting that the timeline is very rarely stuck to you because there's so many external factors. But having clear objectives for each window I think allows people to remain calm. I will say it feels more calm than it is because we've turned the phone off. We've turned the phones off. So it's possible that something is blowing up at any point. Yeah. I think in order to do this job, you need to be able to quickly find clarity in very, very changing circumstances. You have to love the idea of fighting as hard as you can for your football club to get the best possible deals within the confines of your budget. Essentially what you're looking for is organized chaos. How do you approach a negotiation? Look, it's definitely part and parcel of the job that we do qpr this season we've got one of the smallest wage Bills in the league. Which means that in a window like the January window, often you are having to have multiple conversations with clubs at the same time to understand again, what sort of deals could be financially viable or not. There is the deal that, you know, you've been looking to do for a very long period of time. Typically in a summer window where the player's been on the shortlist for three or four months, you're aware of the parameters of the club, you've done your research and understanding what does the other club need to do in this window? How does that fit into ultimately your deal? Does that have a knock on effect? So you try and gather all that information ahead of submitting that first formal offer to, to the club. When an offer comes in, is that in the olden days it would have been on a, on a fax. Right. Now you. Does it drop into your inbox? That's right. It's usually via email. Yeah. I mean, we've had a few via WhatsApp, but that's usually because it's coming, coming to the end of the window and people are just panicked and stressed. Yeah. So you've got maybe a few hours left in the window. Chairman of Brighton Football Club Paul Barber Chief Executive Brighton Hove Albion Football Club Now, Paul, we're here at an event you're speaking. You've managed to find a little bit of time in this transfer window. It's quite remarkable. Just tell me first and foremost, what is it like to be a CEO within a transfer window? Well, it can be stressful this time of year, particularly because the January window is a short one. But equally, the summer window can be just as stressful because it can go on for such a long time or does go on for such a long time. So it really depends on, on, you know, what the club is doing in any window. You know, whether we've got a lot of targets and players to bring in or conversely, a lot of players to move out. Now, we try and plan several windows ahead so we, we know where we are and we've got a very good team that manages the window for us. Brighton have got this wonderful reputation at the moment in terms of your player recruitment model, sales and acquisitions. What is the secret to that success? Well, it would be wrong for me to give the secret away, but we use a lot of data and, you know, as I say, we try and plan several windows ahead. We know the sort of players that we're looking for, what the coach needs, what we can afford, who might be available, and then a lot of work goes in by our recruitment team, our technical staff, to try and make sure that the agents are where we need them to be. We have good relationships with other clubs across the world and obviously then we try and land those targets as early as we can. But it's not an exact science and it's never a perfect window. There are very few windows that go exactly as you had planned them, so you have to be flexible and nimble and be prepared to adapt as well. But, yeah, a lot of planning goes into every. Every window that we. We come to. So adaptability is important. But it's interesting that, you know, and we've seen some deals or negotiations where you have stuck to your guns. You have to set your boundaries, don't you? Yeah. Particularly on sales, because, you know, our model, you know, relies on us buying young players from different parts of the world that perhaps other clubs are not looking into in this quite the same way, then developing those players, spending a lot of time and money and effort in actually coaching those players to Premier League level. And then when it does come to sell, it's important then we get the right price, that we get what we consider to be the best price that we can. And likewise, when we're bringing players in, you know, we're trying to bring those players in before we actually need them, because once you've sold a player and your pocket markets are bulging with cash, as people might perceive it, it's very difficult then to negotiate on bringing a player in. As I say, it's not an exact science. Nothing ever works as perfectly as you'd hope. We have our models for how we value players and also how we bring players in and what we consider the value for them to be as well. Thank you, Paul. Enjoy the rest of the window. Thank you. Mind the gap, please. Right, well, we're heading towards. Towards the final stops on the journey now. Mind the gap, please. Yeah, mind the gap. That's fitting with the difference in valuation sometimes between clubs when negotiating on a player. We'll have more on that in a moment, especially with where I'm heading. But first, here's the Athletics Senior Football News reporter Matt Slater on Saudi Arabia's place in this transfer market. I visited Saudi Arabia for the first time just before Christmas, and while it's very different to most places in the west, there was one thing that was pretty familiar. They are obsessed with footballers. Who's the goat, who's not, why he must come to the Kingdom, why they must go. As far as I could tell, most of these debates take place on social media in the same chaotic, over the top fashion as it does here. So of course the fans all talk about when Mo Salah is coming and which team you should play for. But I did not hear that type of thing from the powers that be at the clubs league and federation. On the contrary, they said the Saudi Pro league had already announced its arrival in the summer of 2023. With that billion dollar outlay, what was needed now was more gradual, behind the scenes improvements. I was repeatedly told that the clubs had spent fortunes improving their training facilities and wanted to raise the stakes of the Saudi players as they are the league's weak link. And I also heard the clubs realise they had spent lots on fees and wages, but not enough on making sure their new recruits and their families had found somewhere to live, a car, a school for their kids. The type of thing Europe's top clubs have done for decades. The Saudis will keep investing in foreign talent. It will just be more targeted. Well, I've just come up the steps from Piccadilly Circus underground station and there is the very familiar sight of those big neon signs here in Piccadilly, which is an interesting place to be because if you think about the transfer market, there is many a crossroad that players reach during their career. And here in central London, away from the more traditional footballing settings of stadiums and train grounds, is an office where we're going to meet someone who plays a key role in some big transfer deals. My name is Daniel G. I am a partner in a law firm called Sheridan's in London. I wanted to start by the location that we're in. We're in central London where contracts are drawn up and essentially without these sort of settings, the contracts, the black and white written down, we wouldn't have any transfers, would we? It might sound ridiculously boring, but there's nothing better for me than being in the office with the other lawyers that I work really closely with. Sometimes you can't help it, you've got to go to the training grounds, you've got to go to the stadium, because that's where things maybe get signed, done, all the rest of it. But usually the hard yards are done in the more inconspicuous places. Declan Rice, for example, that was a deal that you did. After a deal is done or when a deal is being done, is it almost that the the player knows you and will give you a high five or a thanks afterwards because he knows how much work you've done? Yeah, it just depends. Like with the Rice's for example, we know all of them really well just because of the relationship we developed over a long time now. And Dec wrote the forward for one of my books recently, which is really nice of him as well. Sometimes it can be I would just have the relationship with the agent. Sometimes it is actually direct with the player and it's really lovely sometimes. So for example, when I helped with Lotta Woobimoor's renegotiation for her Arsenal deal a little bit ago, literally she was really lovely. Sent me a handwritten note and a signed shirt saying thank you for all the help. Dec did the same A lot of the time for me. You forget all the great stuff that you do and it's sort of just relief and then on to the next thing really. So it's nice to sometimes to sit back and think, you know, hopefully job well done. Typically, where does the, the legal side of doing a deal come in? It's very dependent, but usually I would say it's when the commercials have been agreed and we talk about the commercials. It's salary, wages, bonuses, particular types of amounts that players and agents will get. And then the transfer fee to a degree has also been agreed or is in the process of being agreed between the buying club and the selling club. Usually the clubs are always preparing the contracts and as you can imagine, the clubs are always saying, oh, this is very standard and there's nothing to worry about. And you can just sign on the dotted line as you as you'd expect. And then my role is to be that counter balance and explain that this isn't appropriate or this needs to be clarified or you haven't included that or whatever else it might be. I don't like to be in pressurized situations if you can help it, because it means there's leverage one way or the other, even if the leverage is the transfer window shuts at a particular time. You know, a lot of my role I feel sometimes is risk management. You know, it's usually taken a lot of invisible work for the agent and the players and the clubs to get to the position where, you know, I'm dotting the I's and crossing the t's. But what I'm really careful about is not trying to derail a deal. From a legal perspective. That's always my major worry. But at the same time, my worry is a client signing up to an unduly risky contract. Can you just explain to me what add ons are? There are two types of add ons and we can talk about either there's transfer fee add ons and there is player contract add ons. Usually you'd call those variable amounts. So usually a selling club will want to ensure those continue contingency payments are as small as possible or obtainable. So if you are selling to Manchester City you would hope that you would have a contingency which said Manchester City to qualify for the Champions League for most seasons for example on the player contract side, what tends to happen at the larger clubs now as well is they will have a particular amount which will be a guaranteed basic salary and over and above that there will be lots of variable payments depending. So it might be for example if a player starts in the game and the team wins, then him or her might be entitled to X amount of win bonus. Next one to explain stage payments. So let's just say on a 50 million pound transfer and a fifth is paid up front, it might actually be that only 30 million is a fixed amount that is going to be guaranteed paid by buyer to seller regardless of anything else and that remaining 20 million is dependent on some of the variable things that we've talked about before. Here's a question for you. How free is a free transfer? Very expensive is the answer, at least for free transfers into or out of the big elite leagues. A free transfer for an elite player might still be cheaper for a club than a transfer fee and set of wages for that same player. The difference is when you don't have to pay a transfer fee, a portion if not all or some will go to the player and their agent in terms of signing on loyalty fees, higher wages, bigger commission amounts, etc and that's because a lot of the time there may be more of a an auction for that player's services and there's a lot of attention often on the transfer fee and less so on the wages that are going to be due. Do you think the balance is right there? People will say whether a player is a transfer success or a transfer failure sometimes based on what the transfer fee is. Liverpool, Brighton and others have been quite successful in not gaming the system but doing a very good job, having no problem paying quite large transfer fees that are sometimes paid in quite generous installments, but actually the wages being probably below market rate. And what does transfer deadline day look like for you? Transfer deadline day? I have usually got most of the stuff done not saying it doesn't happen and I'm definitely putting a hex on it for this window obviously, but usually the stuff that happens pretty last minute. I'm firstly worried that sometimes my clients aren't Taking legal advice at all. And they're just going on and doing stuff because it's so late in the day. But I'm always at my desk until late to try and help with particular things. And it does happen every now and then when something, something significant happens, which leads to a lot of domino effects in particular deals. But I tend not to be ridiculously busy on deadline day. Okay, so personal terms, the players contract and the agreement, club to club, is pretty much all sorted. One last key step to come in a moment, but let's hear from Julien Laurence in France. What makes the French transfer window a little bit different than the other countries is that Liga is a selling league. Obviously, this is very much the business model of every single club, pretty much apart from psg. But even the likes of Monaco, Lyon, Marseille see the transfer windows as, this is it, we have to make money here. We are those young players that we bring through, give a platform to shine for, then English clubs, Spanish clubs, German clubs and Italian clubs to come and buy them and finance our league, basically. So it's a very different approach. It's a different market too. It's a young market for a lot of young players that still go for a lot of money, but it's a different dynamic really to the other big four leagues markets. So with so many players leaving the French league, it may well be that one of them ends up being driven to a training ground in England sometime soon for the final hurdle, the medical. My name's Jeff Scott. I'm a medical and performance consultant and previously was at Tottenham Hotspur for 20 years as head of medicine and sports science. The medical is the really kind of pinnacle moment. Their day starts by flying in generally, or driving down. If they come in from somewhere else in the uk, our team manager would pick them up at the airport, bring them to us, and that's when the day starts. There's generally quite a lot of media work that the player needs to do as well, and so that will be intertwined between the medical as well. And then on the administration and contractual side, there's generally things still going on as well, where the club hierarchy and the recruitment team is kind of just working on the final details of the contract. Now, at Tottenham, we were very lucky. We had a player hotel, effectively where we were able to kind of seal it off. So it was only the key people involved could get access to the building. We've got a lot of space, gym, treatment room, so we've got everything we need to perform the medical on the day and make sure they have breakfast. The only thing we do prior to that is a blood test. So they have a kind of a fasted blood test on arrival. Then we really go into a questionnaire, which is kind of a full medical screening. So we're checking everything at this stage, eye tests, hearing tests, make sure neurologically everything is all good. And actually really spending about an hour talking with the player, diving into family history and their past medical history. Following that, we go into the physical examination. We're very sensitive to everything. If we've got swelling on a knee, that's the kind of thing we're looking for. Any surgical scars that are not defined, the questionings, but then also trying to find out things that they haven't told us, which is also a part of the medical day. Is that common? It is in that the medical is for most players, they probably only go through one or two medicals in their life. So it's quite a big day. Obviously, normally if they're joining a club like Tottenham, it's attached with a big contract and there's a lot of pressure on them. So a big part of the medical also was to kind of find areas where we think, well, actually this player is playing, playing at a very high standard, but we might find something that we can improve and then hopefully improve the player. So we've done blood tests, screening, physical testing, what comes next? Okay, normally following that, we would bring in our nutritionist, who does body composition, height, weight and basic biometrics. And then we need to book an MRI for approximately about three hours to be sure that we can kind of COVID all the joints that we need to. It's part that they find quite difficult because it's very boring. Lie in an MRI scanner, which is quite claustrophobic, and then it's back in the van, back to the training ground for the final part, which generally is cardiology. That's the bit that's quite often publicized and you see videos of it online. I think it looks a bit more exciting than the rest of it because there's lots of wires and machines connected. The player will have an ECG echocardiogram. And then at Tottenham, we would also add an exercise stress test, which is about a 15 minute program, walking on the treadmill uphill, taking them up to kind of maximal heart rate levels. So that really is the conclusion of the medical. And then it's quite an anxious time for the player. You know, have I passed? Have I failed? And no, it doesn't really work like that. If there's something really obvious, then of course we're going to have to flag it as something to prevent the sign in, but that's actually very, very uncommon. We have to risk profile it and then give that information to the hierarchy of the club so that they understand what they're buying. We're very interested if we find things like that, like what's the length of the contract. If it's a six year contract, then we have to give the recommendations potentially that within that six years this will be a problem. Then there become quite serious discussions about length of contract and that can affect the purchase price sometimes as well that there might be further negotiation on. On the price one comes to mind was actually a loan deal, but for a very high profile player who we found a ruptured ligament in his knee which he knew about but hadn't told us about. Nothing that we couldn't fix and nothing that was going to be a major problem long term, but it was going to prevent him playing for six weeks. I wouldn't know the details of what they did, but I know they adjusted it so that they started the payments later. At Tottenham, the day would kind of end in the early evening with the player coming out of our medical room. Huge celebrations with their family and agents as they sign their contract. And that's kind of always exciting part of the day as it all kind of reaches the conclusion. And while all of this has been happening, if the story isn't out there, it will be sooner. More often than not, if it's a big one, it will be David Ornstein that will break it with Sparky watching on. My approach and that of most others is you want to be right, we have to be right. You know, we're governed by editorial guidelines. At the Athletic, you go through a stern vetting process with all of your information relating to transfers, managerial changes, new contracts, injuries. The business of transfers is ever more popular with the public. They're salivating over this information. They in many cases place more importance on it than the matches themselves. And I see similarities in American football and basketball with the draft system. And I can relate to it because you can publish a story during a match, even big matches, and that will often become a bigger talking point and it will get more interactions on social media and it will become the buzz. It will set the agenda. You'll hear it on television and radio as the lead story or a major story. It will be the talk of friends around the table, in the pubs and on WhatsApp groups. Don't underestimate the power of the transfer market. To the contrary, you give it all the respect it deserves. Thanks to everyone along the journey who contributed to the Anatomy of a Transfer. It was written and presented by me, Adam Leventhal on the move. The executive producer was Abby Patterson. Now let's get that window closed. Hey, sports podcast fans. Did you know Discover is accepted in 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide? That's right, 99%. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. 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