Comments on: Player Contracts in Soccer – A Waste of time?

By: abdul

abdul — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:09:34 +0000

free lance agents comments plz.

By: James Alexander Taylor

James Alexander Taylor — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:09:07 +0000

Thank you for your contributions. Alec, you are right when you give the reasons for player contracts being in place. However, do they actually serve their purpose?

1. To ensure transfer fees are maximized for the club.
With players now being able to buy-out their contracts (the ‘Webster’ clause), the idea that clubs are able to get their money’s worth out of their players is limited. Player contracts can no longer provide a guarantee that the club will receive a healthy transfer fee. The Webster clause can in fact have the effect of providing clubs with little, or even no transfer fee.

2. Team Stability
Stability is sadly jeopardised by a lack of committment from players towards their clubs. If they can get better money elsewhere, they will often pursue that option instead of honoring the 2,3,4,5,6 year contract they had originally signed. And in any case stability is undermined when players can walk out of a club and buy-out their contracts as discussed above.

3. Wages & Bonuses
This serves a more practical purpose (having a written document that states how much the player is to be remunerated). But the same goes for any contract of employment – your wages and bonuses are written and signed so you can have a legal document securing this for your own piece of mind. The concern is that it seems that this is the only purpose that player contracts serve these days.

By: Alec

Alec — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:08:37 +0000

The biggest problem with football is that it’s often the agent who gets the rumor mill going as part of standard business practice. There’s an agent named Willie McKay who was notorious for getting his clients to move saying the are playing for the shirt, they love the club, then want to move the following season. The scouting networks are more controlled by managers and agents than clubs themselves, especially once you get beyond the top tier of clubs.

It makes perfect sense that Sonny Vaccaro is getting involved in euro basketball, he’ll fit in like a glove

By: Jeremie Andre

Jeremie Andre — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:57:03 +0000

The problem is contrary to others sports like basketball, football in soccer the team who wants a player has to pay a compensation to his team in order to buy is contract so it’s not a trade and without the notion of salary cap . With a trade even if the player don’t want to be trade he has no chose. In soccer, the soccer club depend of what the player wants and it become more difficult to them to keep a player nowadays.

Moreover, when a player sign in a new team he will earn a bonus add to his salary, this bonus could be very important. It can represent a year of contract, so the player has an another motivation to change team.

We can also see an increase of contacts between a player and the team who want him without the authorization of his club which it’s forbidden by Fifa Rules. And it’s really easy to attract a young player with your money…

But there are a lot of explanations about the difficulties to keep a player under contract in soccer.

By: Alec

Alec — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:28:02 +0000

Contracts in soccer are basically there for 3 reasons:

1: To ensure transfer fees are maximized for the club.

Transfer value in Europe is at its highest when there’s 2 years left on a contract. At 1 year the fear of a player pulling a Bosman drives the selling price down, same goes for a player who’s 28 and can buy himself out of the final year of his contract(difficult in theory, but not in practice,(at least in the UK.))

2: Team stability

In lower divisions roster turnover YoY can be over 50% due to clubs having to sell players up and buy players from lower divisions

3: To sort out wages & bonuses for the player

Real Madrid may very well be guilty of tampering, but if Ronaldo were to move there they’ll have to pay a very dear price to make the transfer happen AND have to bump up Ronaldo’s wages to $6mm+/year. Players also get a part of the transfer fee, IIRC.