The transfer market is on the edge of collapse, and the explosion is working to Arsenal’s advantage « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Tony Attwood

Man City are the only Premier League club that has bought no one so far this summer – and in terms of sales they haven’t brought in any major money either.

Just to summarise the countrywide scene: Arsenal have bought in two players, Villa four, Chelsea four, Everton one, Fulham three, Everton one, Man U two, Newcastle two, Norwich four, QPR six, Reading six, Southampton four, Stoke two, Sunderland one, Swansea three, Tottenham two, WBA three, West Ham six, Wigan one.  (The figures come from soccernews.com – they might not be 100% but you get the general picture.)

Of course these players range in price from £80m or so by Chelsea, to £27m by Arsenal, £19m by Man U, nothing by Fulham (frees and a loan), etc etc.  Again some figures are guesswork (by soccernews not by me).

So it is approximate stuff, but still, at the moment of writing I don’t think Man C have signed anyone.  The boss blamed our old pal Brian Marwood for not getting stuck into the market – and of course there is a long way to go.  As we found last season, you can do a lot on the last day.

But surely Man C, with all the money, can’t be hanging around can they?   Well… they are on the sales front for they still have Adebayor, Santa Cruz, Tevez and Dzeko, and that suggests that they are trying to sell these unwanteds before they buy.  Which might mean that they are actually looking at the Financial Fair Play regulations, or it might mean that  the wily old head-scraper-with-the-boot Adebayor is demanding that he continues to get his Man C salary when he moves.

The trouble is, when a player gets used to £4 million a year plus bonuses, he can find it hard to take less.  Santa Cruz cost £18m and is on goodness knows what of a salary, so who wants to match his salary even if Man C give him away?  No one really – and for two reasons.  One is he isn’t that good, and the other is that the whole of the football world is changing beneath our feet and it is starting to look like transfers, wages and bonuses might have peaked.

And at such a point the market in footballers can look exactly like the market in shares, diamonds, personalised number plates and fine wine.

To some degree some of these items have a value through their use – but even then that value can be highly inflated because the market believes the price will rise forever.  But it never does, and so suddenly people think that personalised number plates are actually rather prattish, the stock market is probably fixed by bent bankers, and fewer people are getting married so fewer diamonds are being sold.

Who is to say that Robin van Persie is worth £5m or £50m?  The value in fact is just what someone will pay, and now, leaving aside the special case of Chelsea, everyone is starting to look a little uncertainly at these prices and think, “Did we really pay that much for one player?”

That doesn’t mean the market has stopped, but I think it has just had its first wobble in many a long year.   (It won’t be the first time – in the early days of the transfer market at the end of the 19th century, player values just about doubled every two years as the clubs got the hang of the idea of transfers.  Then suddenly there was a dip around 1905, and all the prices went down again.  It happens.)

But why now?  Why should football destabilise at this point?

There are so many reasons that when one starts looking at them, they seem obvious.  Each one of these reasons could cause some wobbling in the system.  Stick them all together and you have chaos.  Probably now, but if not, next year.

FFP is one reason for the crisis. No one knows if the big boys can ignore it, or if something actually might happen.  The huge escalation in prices for not-that-special  players is a second.  And third, the fact that a player can be poached or can announce in year three of a four year deal that he’s off, suddenly makes the value of players meaningless.

Fourth, the advent of the billionaire clubs has meant that the non-billionaire funded sides know they can’t keep up, so they need to turn away and try and look for bargains and indeed seek to start running a decent youth system.  Worse some of the billionaires turn out to be money launderers, and some are just plain incompetent dodos.  Even some players are waking up to the fact that virtually every top player Arsenal “lose” actually makes Arsenal a packet, and costs the buying club a fortune, while the players ends up in no-man’s-land.

Fifth, the manipulation of the market by agents, the media and non-participating clubs means the market is utterly unstable anyway.  I’ve mentioned it before, but agents will tout a player even if he doesn’t want to leave just to get the media to show an interest, which in turn could get the club he’s with to improve the contract.   Tell the world Arsenal are after some obscure player in the French league and his price goes through the roof overnight – with other half-baked managers buying the poor sap just because of the rumour that Arsenal wanted him.

Finally: Rangers and Portsmouth.  Those are just two examples from Britain – scout around Europe and there are many more.  Somehow clubs thought that it wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen here.  Fraud, false contracts, financial disasters, bankruptcy, quadruple relegation, no players… no, that’s Italy isn’t it?  Actually no, it isn’t.  Suddenly football clubs don’t look like the place you might want to have your money.

In summary, a bent, over-inflated system, with crooks and unstable billionaires involved, and players and their agents seeking salaries so large that they are beyond obscenity: it is amazing the system has lasted this long!

It is like the Emperor’s New Clothes or Barclays Bank, Nat West, or Royal Bank of Scotland, or Northern Rock, or Lehman Brothers.  Anyone outside the industry could see the whole system was as sane as a bunch of baboons running Britain’s political system… and then kerplunk.

Man City could of course have Agüero, Balotelli, Silva, Deko, Tevez, Santa Cruz, Adebayor and RVP – with each one expecting to be first choice each week.   But one day someone is going to say, “can you actually play all those guys – even with rotation?”  And suddenly the club think, oh, we don’t need eight forwards.  And then the players start to cry and stamp their feet and say, “But I want to play every game!  You told me I could!”

So the alternative for Man C is – let’s sell some of these guys.  Except no one wants to buy at anything like the crazed amount Man City, Chelsea, PSG and the rest are paying.  And no one wants to pay the salaries that are asked.   RVP is said to want about £50m across the five years of the contract he is demanding – with the knowledge that long before the end he’s going to be worth next to nothing.

And all this before Man City revealed that they paid over £6m bonus to their players for winning the league.

Markets sometimes fall apart suddenly, dramatically and with one hell of a crash.  But markets supported by billionaires can come down more gently, or have the appearance of being quite stable when they are not.  How this will shake out I don’t know.

But the one thing that all false markets have in common is that just before the collapse, no one believes anything is wrong.  So the clubs with big name players to sell hold tight, still demanding their insane transfer prices, as the players hold tight while demanding 5 year contracts at £200,000 a week irrespective of injury and form.

(I’m reminded of a time when around 1997 I was looking to buy a house near Rutland Water – a lovely part of England.  I went from house to house where retired couples looking to downsize were asking around 50% more for their houses than they were worth at the current market rate.  The reason was that two years before house prices had been at their peak – but these poor saps had not sold.  Instead they had waited for the market to go even higher before so they could make more profit, before they moved to their retirement cottage in Cornwall.  And when the price collapsed they simply couldn’t accept that they had screwed up by holding on, and so kept on asking for prices that no one would pay – at least not for another 10 years).

In the midst of all this we have two clubs sailing on serenely.   Chelsea who act as if nothing has changed – no FFP, no inability to sell players once bought for crazy prices, no financial collapse in Spain making it hard for clubs to borrow money, nothing.  I have no idea what they think they are doing, but presumably when you have that much money and you see another billionaire looking over your shoulder, well, no one is going to tell you that you are a semi-skimmed nutter who needs to be taken out in a wheelbarrow.

And Arsenal – profit making, amazing youth system, best stadium in the country, and ready to leap up another level financially as the old marketing contracts come to an end and Man U finally find they have a rival when it comes to squeezing money out of sponsors.

Of course you might not believe a word of this.   And why should you?  One Arsenal season ticket holder sitting here spouting the same old stuff for four years now.

And maybe I’ve got it wrong and nothing will happen.  OK, so we carry on. But if something is building up to a big bang, I’m still sure there’s only one big time club that is going to sail through it all.

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If you think you know your Arsenal, it is time to think again.

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• Ref Review – Tottenham Hotspur.  When it really mattered some refs turned.