Don’t make me do the maths - Square Ball 21/8/23

PROFIT, LOSS & LOANS

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

Transfers are supposed to be easy, with the only difficulty the moral obscenity of moving millions of pounds around so a player can play for a different team (and make more money for them) instead of using that money to do something good. But more deals are sounding to me more and more complicated, and I don’t just mean Leeds United’s loan-clause/FFP drama, although I’ll get to that.

But here’s what went down with David Raya, the goalie, the other week. He had a year left on his contract at Brentford. He signed a new deal with them, replacing that with a two-year contract, plus a ‘club option’ for another year. Then, in return for an initial £3m, Brentford loaned Raya to Arsenal for a year, with an option to make the transfer permanent by paying another £27m. ‘Bayern Munich,’ according to The Athletic, ‘had explored a similar deal’.

It doesn’t sound a millions miles from Leeds giving Diego Llorente a new contract last season then loaning him straight away to Roma with a ‘permanent option’ (that they didn’t use, getting him instead on loan again this summer), except that Raya is an excellent goalkeeper and Llorente — well, I’ve not seem him in nets so maybe he’s brilliant.

Brentford’s director of football, Phil Giles, realised their fans would want some explanations about the deal for Raya, so he told their official website, “simply that it enables this deal to be done more rapidly between both clubs, with all parties wanting to make this a permanent transfer as soon as practically possible, whenever that might be.”

The simple enabling rapid practicality of all this is probably related to the subject of the next article I ploughed through on The Athletic’s website: ‘Why Chelsea believe their £900m transfer spending is within FFP rules’. This explains how Financial Fair Play rules about writing down transfer fees by spreading them through the years of a contract – amortisation – means a £50m signing on £100,000 per week can ‘cost’ a club less per year than a free transfer on £400,000 per week (without The Athletic even pausing to blink at the size of their example wage packets). It’s thanks to this that Chelsea’s spending of £900m on new players can be balanced by getting £200m for old players, with ‘amortised spending’ of £157m in the last three transfer windows balanced by £150m accounting profit, while bringing their wage bill down at the same time. It feels like only in football that spending nearly £1bn on some lads to kick a ball around can be the path to fiscal sustainability, but here we are. And there Chelsea are, with their biggest risk being becoming Leeds, with a ‘renewed emphasis on targeting players aged 23 or younger’:

Boehly and Clearlake have essentially re-made Chelsea’s squad as an investment portfolio: a collection of talented young footballers committed to Stamford Bridge for what should be their prime years, but whose transfer values could fall as well as rise depending on any number of variables that can affect individual development.

Anyway, for now Chelsea’s future implosion is a pleasure deferred, and I only hope that when it happens I will have tilted enough of my spilling brain back into my ears after reading all this to be able to understand exactly how they’re going out of business, or the accounting manoeuvres keeping them in business. And I’m frankly not right keen on getting involved with either option.

Leeds United’s summer surfing of the profit and sustainability rules has been a pain. It has been a struggle to make the loan clauses that have taken so many players away make sense, and perhaps we should have all just made like Daniel Farke, who declared the contracts at Leeds United to be an unprecedented badness in the western world. But the larger point is that, beyond our inherent Leedsiness, transfer news everywhere is being published with an appendix of concepts so that fans can understand what is going on.

This is a quandary. Fans have to understand what is going on because we can’t trust the people who own our football clubs to do it well. But I don’t want to understand what is going on, because I don’t want to have to think like the chief executive officer of a football club. The CEOs aren’t fun: they’re the boring looking guys, tense and sweaty, who are there to be screamed at when things go wrong, and to stay firmly out of the way when the team does cool things that have nothing to do with them. A CEO might object to that and try itemising his influence, but I might put my fingers in my ears and say ‘la la la’ because I won’t care. I became fascinated by football because I wondered what it felt like to be one of those players kicking a ball into the goal, and used to take my own ball out to the park to try being Tony Yeboah for myself. I never wanted to be Angus Kinnear. Hell, even Angus Kinnear didn’t want to be Angus Kinnear, he wanted to be Lars Elstrup, but that’s his problem and I don’t welcome him and his chief executive ilk making it mine.

I suppose it was nice of Brentford’s director of football to explain the Raya deal, but it’s a lot more than most fans want to think about. Selling a player for a certain amount, then spending that amount on some new ones – or sending it for a rest in the British Virgin Islands – was working just fine, conceptually. Explanations, in the end, will make things worse. At some point, Angus Kinnear is going to (well, probably) try to explain the financial constraints Leeds United have been working with, that have led to Daniel Farke only having five outfield players on his bench against West Brom. And, while he explains it, he’s going to say something like, ‘I know this is difficult for supporters to understand…’ – and supporters are going to understand their urge to flush his head down a toilet. It’s true that the sport’s financial structures have reached a point that means they are difficult for supporters to understand. But ‘football is for the fans’, according to the t-shirt that hangs in the window of Elland Road’s offices, and a game we can’t easily follow is a game that is getting harder and harder to enjoy.

Complication also infers expertise, and I don’t think Leeds United have earned that assumption this summer. There’s not much evidence that the people working at Leeds understand football finances either. What I understand right now is that Leeds have let a lot of players leave due to contracts the club gave them that have now put the club into self-inflicted difficulties about signing new players, and if the people working at Elland Road and giving quotes to the Daily Mail about how detailed and analytical their work is think I’m stupid enough to believe this is all part of some grand plan provided to them by a ‘third-party data company’ whose findings on what it takes to get promoted were ‘myth-busting and many’, then they’re probably stupid enough to hire a third-party data company that would sell them such a plan.

Here’s something I understand. According again to The Athletic, Everton’s signing of our Jack Harrison was the culmination of ‘a three-month-long pursuit’ of a player with a simple-to-trigger loan clause in his contract. To replace him before the end of the transfer window, and the others who have left, Leeds United have ten days. If I was them, I’d be keeping the next week as simple as possible.