Transfer Window Special: Market Insiders on How the Deals Get Done
It is that time of year when football, an industry renowned for excess, manages to surpass itself with such a show of greed, desperation and panic that January is fast becoming one of the standout events on the sporting calendar. It's the winter transfer window, football's new year sales.
With more than half the season gone, managers, players, agents and chairmen have been itching to improve their lot since the summer. It can be make or break for some. If they make the right deal, clubs and players could gain promotion. If they get it wrong, they could be relegated, costing a club millions.
The window opened on January 3 and closes on February 2. In between, there has been such frenzied activity that millions will be splurged seemingly on a whim—£130 million was spent in the Premier League during the January window last year, per the BBC, with £35m on deadline day alone.
But is it really as chaotic as the gossip columns and 24-hour sports news channels would have you believe? What are the inner workings of the window? Who does the research on a player? How is a deal set up and by whom? And what happens when a deal collapses?
Here, the protagonists reveal what happens. It all starts with one man, sitting in a stand while making notes about each of the players he watches below.
The Scout
The window may be open, but a curtain of secrecy was drawn months ago. When a chairman and manager resolve to sign a player, even the men who unearthed the talent are not told what is going on. The scouts, the talent spotters clocking up the miles to matches all over the world, are kept in the dark.
"We're told nothing," says Sandy Byers, a scout at West Ham United. "The next thing you know, they've signed a guy you watched three or four months ago."
Byers has been a scout for 25 years. He worked at Manchester United for 14 of them, starting out at the academy under Nobby Stiles and Brian Kidd. He worked alongside arguably the greatest British manager of them all, Sir Alex Ferguson—a man he remembers as "a fair guy."
Byers followed Kidd to Leeds United for two years and found his way to Upton Park via Blackburn Rovers.
"We're used to not being told what goes on," Byers told Bleacher Report. "They keep their cards close to their chest because they know people talk. You hear whispers, but we're not needed because our work is done months before. We've watched the guy loads of times."
The six scouts at West Ham are not even told the position of the player the club are looking to sign. This differs from most Premier League clubs, where a meeting of the scouting staff and manager will be held and there will be a frank exchange about what is required—position, type of player, character, possible targets.
"If three of us have got really good reports on this lad, either the manager or the assistant will go and have a look at him," Byers said. "You do a report on every player…whether they're rubbish or whatever. You grade them. If an 'A' keeps coming up against a player, the club will follow that up. If I've seen a player, then I'd like to concentrate on him, but it doesn't work like that. You might not see him again for two months."
Once a player is identified as the potential target of a deal, there is no guarantee a manager will agree, which can lead to frustration and tension between the scouting and management staffs.
"I'll give you an example," he says. "Wilfried Bony. I did five reports on him when he was at Vitesse Arnhem. He was raw, but he stood out a mile. The crowd loved him and if he'd have come to West Ham they'd have loved him. They said, 'Nah he's got no technique.' I said, 'He's been leading scorer for two seasons, this boy.' 'Yeah, but it's a different game in Holland.' These are the types of things you're up against.''
With scouts at the beginning of the chain, they are also targets for unscrupulous agents, the men who oil the mechanism of a deal.
"Oh yeah, agents are always trying to push players onto you," Byers said. "They say, 'If you can push this player for me, I'll see you right.' Money, holidays. I know for a fact if we were caught at West Ham dealing in that, your feet wouldn't touch the ground. You never ever got involved in that because you would stink and you wouldn't be working anywhere. I know some people have done it and been well looked after."
So enter the agent, the man with the most scurrilous reputation in football. What are the tricks of his trade?
The Players' Agent
A players' agent who has clients in the Premier League, Scottish Premier League and League Two requested anonymity because frank comments attached to his name in relation to the inner workings of the window might impair his ability to effectively work with players and clubs. The agent has been in the business for eight years.
"Of course we speak to scouts," he said. "We need them to watch our players."
And "putting the feelers out" begins months before the window opens.
"The work probably starts in November for the January window," he said. "You're trying to find a better club for your clients."
The goal, the agent said, is for the scouts to attend your players' games. After the scout relays his opinion of the player to his manager—a process that takes a few weeks usually—the manager will take in a game.
"Then we'll get together to talk about a possible deal," the agent told Bleacher Report. After which, the two clubs will have to agree on a fee.
The agent makes it sound easy, but aficionados of the game will know that rules are being bent. Normally, a club has to give permission for its player to discuss a move with another club. But the agent says everyone does it before that. The two clubs negotiating is the last piece of the puzzle.
"It's frowned upon, but everyone does it," he says.
He told me agents speak to clubs to find out what positions they'll need in the window three or four months before. If the agent has what they need, he or she will start to make calls and send them info around October and November. Then they'll do their shop window stuff.
"A lot of clubs have done all their due diligence on a player by January. That player will know there's an interest in November or December," the agent said.
He said the biggest hurdle is agreeing on personal terms, such as bonuses and release clauses, so that is dealt with first. It can take time, and if it's taking too long, the agent said you try to manipulate the media.
"Clubs and agents both do it," he said. "I might try to get some column inches about one of my players attracting interest from two or three rivals of the club I am talking to. If they see on a website a story like that, they'll escalate things. Likewise, they'll put it out that they're interested in two other players to try to get me to act faster. Twitter is really useful for getting things out there."
The agent laughs when asked about his reputation for being greedy.
"Look, every player has an agent and without agents, deals would not get done," he claims. "Some agents earn ridiculous money, but that's only a minority.
"Lower down in the Football League, an agent might earn five percent—about £5,000 a year—of the basic salary of a player. There are agents fees for doing a deal, but some clubs won't pay that. There are clubs I won't deal with [because of that]."
Agents representing the club and the player will work together to get a transfer finalised in an effort to bypass rules about clubs speaking to players before they are allowed to.
"People think of the transfer window as full of skulduggery. I will sit down and have a coffee with an agent to get it all sorted. A quiet chat over a coffee. It's not a dark art," the agent said. "And that agent has been employed by the club to help move a player out."
The Club Agent
Meet Seb Ewen. He is 35 and has been an agent for 10 years. He is director of 12th Player Management. He works for clubs, helping them to move players who are no longer wanted because they've fallen out with the manager, want to be closer to home or, as Ewen says, "a thousand and one other reasons."
"The common perception is that agents work for players and players only," Ewen said. "I didn't have any background in football initially, so I had to come up with something different. You can represent players and tell them until you are blue in the face how to behave, but there is something very difficult about managing a 19-year-old who is clearing £40,000 every month. If you were getting that every month when you were that age, how would you behave?"
Ewen has a number of clients, consisting mainly of managers and clubs.
"I'll work on behalf of clubs to broker the sale or loan of their players," he says.
"What I try to do is look at the financial liability a club has toward its squad. If a guy is earning £20,000 a week and not playing, you have a liability of £1 million a year. In the January window specifically, I try to find clubs that are looking to take on extra playing staff on a short-term basis.
"If you look at the number of managerial changes in the Premier League in the last month, you'll see how players who were not playing under previous regimes can become key ones for the new regime."
Ewen said there are a lot of other reasons why a club will look to sell a player.
"The most bizarre one I know of was when one European club signed a player not realising until the paperwork was being filed with FIFA that they had too many foreign players in their squad.
"Two days later, one of the more favoured players was transferred to his home country, clueless as to what he'd done to be sold so quickly. He still doesn't know."
Ewen says that clubs and managers can make mistakes.
"The amount a manager will accept for a player and what the club will accept is often out of kilter," he says, illustrating the point with yet another revealing anecdote.
"A certain manager called up for a player, offered £1 million. The player wasn't worth £1m in anyone's book, but the manager was determined to get the player. The manager who received the offer…pissed himself laughing, thought it was joke. 'Stop wasting my time' and hung up. Then the club offered double in writing."
Despite much of the groundwork for moves in January already being done, Ewen expects some late activity.
"We used to get a fax through on deadline day from Premier League clubs asking what we had," Ewen said. "That doesn't happen now. But transfers can happen very, very last minute because when one player moves at the top, it sets off a chain reaction and managers of clubs lower down the leagues can benefit."
The New Manager
Lee Johnson, 33, is one such manager. He is in charge at League One Oldham Athletic. He was appointed in March 2013 and is the Football League's youngest manager. Getting to grips with the vagaries of the window has been one of the toughest aspects of the job.
Johnson has had to rebuild his squad in each of the windows due to the sale of players. He is, unashamedly, a wheeler and dealer, looking to beg, borrow or steal.
"At Oldham, we're a home for the unloved," he said.
In his time there, the club has sold £1.6 million worth of players and had to replace those players with other assets. "It's getting harder and harder to do, but they are out there," Johnson said of the quality players available.
To find those quality players, Johnson said you have to know your market.
"We can't spend money," he said. "So it might be someone who's been badly injured. Or someone who's gone through the youth system but will always be seen as a youngster and is the first to be dropped."
Johnson said he was speaking to former Oldham manager Joe Royle the other day and Royle said when he was at Oldham, he could pick players from Man United or Leeds reserves for £300 a week.
"Now these players are on £15-20k a week. That blows us out of the water," Johnson said.
Johnson told me Oldham have three options when looking to bring in players in the window. They either go for a marquee signing, who they would "pay top wages for," players Johnson calls "stocking fillers," who have potential to be sold later, or players who are brought in purely to police the dressing room.
"It's funny because you plan for months, but it can change in an instant," Johnson said. "Players become available at the last minute because they've not been able to get fixed up and desperately need a club and you can do a deal."
This past summer, Johnson said his club was after a centre-back and George Elokobi, who the year before was valued 12 times higher than what they could afford, suddenly became available. Johnson said due diligence is always done to make sure the deal is right.
"We work all hours. We're all analysts," Johnson said. "We don't have a huge team of scouts. If a player became available, I'd be able to look at every single touch of the ball in his last 10 games on our software. So you get a good picture of whether they're competent, whether they track their runners. That video lasts about an hour and a half. You can see when they get subbed, whether they kick the water bottles over or shake the manager's hand. It's amazing. That's the first port of call."
And what sort of information can kill a potential deal? "We do character references for every player. I want players who love playing football, not those who love the lifestyle of being a footballer. I want players to commit to improving themselves and the club. Even in my short time here, I've signed a couple who've conned me."
Johnson, who believes Oldham could have been relegated if he hadn't gotten recruitment right in the last January window, says that the pressure to sign the right player is almost as intense as the desire for good results on the pitch.
"You stand or fall by those decisions. You can't come out and say, 'He's only on 200 quid a week' or, 'He's a stopgap.' I find that frustrating."
Indeed, for all managers outside the traditional big clubs (Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool), the window is a fraught time. They cannot all splurge millions on the best in the world. They have to get it right. If they don't, they lose their job.
The Veteran Manager
"I've never liked the window," says Kevin Blackwell. "No other industry works like football. You wouldn't run Vauxhall on rules which say they can only sell cars for four weeks of a year. It's bedlam."
Blackwell is a former manager of Leeds United, Luton Town, Sheffield United and Bury. More recently, he has just left his role as coach at Crystal Palace after manager Neil Warnock was sacked. He has seen the impact of how a "broken window" costs managers their job—sometimes his own—at every level.
"When Tony Pulis was at Palace, he didn't get his top targets signed and that's why he left, I believe." Blackwell says. "That's not Tony's fault, and he felt he couldn't continue. But when you're a manger and you don't get the players in that you want, you're in trouble."
At most top clubs, a manager will approach his chairman, or chief executive, with a list of targets he wants to sign. There will be at least three choices for each position. It will be the job of the chairman to make sure the deal is done with the No. 1 choice. If not, they move down the list. The problem—or the panic—comes when a club realises it is not the only one chasing a player.
"The pressure a manager is under is immense at this time," Blackwell says. "It's hard enough to get a signing right at the best of times, but to do it in a concentrated four-week period is very, very hard. I know you can do all the preliminary work with scouts, analysts and agents, but it can all be for nothing."
Blackwell said all the preliminary work can be wasted if you find out that a number of clubs are in for the same player.
"On one or two occasions, I had to sign players down the list," he said. "We did all the homework and we had our top targets and one by one we got picked off and had to settle for our sixth target. And he was a casualty. He struggled at Championship level and he hardly played."
During his time at Palace, Blackwell said players were signed who weren't ready to compete at the level required and Pulis, the manager at the the time, was frustrated by that.
"[Pulis] had five or six targets for strikers because they were struggling for goals, but they didn't come off," Blackwell said. "It's thoroughly frustrating when fans chant, 'You don't know what you're doing' and you know the players you were actually after are not available to you and you are making do and mending."
After the scout and manager find the player, it is down to the chairman to get the deal done.
The Chairman
A former Football League chairman, who wanted to remain nameless for fear of staining the reputation of players he worked with, spoke to Bleacher Report.
"If the manager's under pressure, what about the chairman?" says the former chairman, who found the transfer window the most "intense" and "exhilarating" period of the season.
"I've got to move players out to get targets in so we have it both ways."
The window, he says, is the biggest test for a relationship between chairman and manager.
"He has to trust you to get the players he wants. To trust you to go away and do it. He doesn't want to be phoning you or coming to see you every five minutes asking, 'What's going on with this deal.' I think after a window, you often see a lot of relationships break down and managers leave their jobs."
As soon as the manager produces "The List"—those players he wants to sign—work begins, although the former chairman admits that transfer targets are a constant topic of conversation, one that evolves even on a daily basis.
"It's constantly changing and you're constantly working on signings," he explained. "You'll have your top target and you'll begin immediately on that because if there is no fee involved, the manager would have already spoken to the player and the agent is normally onside.
"But you will also work on the next two targets as well. You get the ball rolling because you don't want to have to start from square one if your top choice falls through. We wanted to be ready to be able to quickly move from one target to another seamlessly."
It is the chairman's job to solve problems in a deal, whether that be helping a player relocate or finding room in a budget which is close to busting.
"There are a myriad of things to work out," the former chairman said. "With the agent, you're talking about the basic salary. And you go back and forth a lot. That's normal. But there are fine details. You might have to pay a relocation bonus. I think the tax-free ceiling is £8,000.
"Then there are the bonuses. Let's say the average player in League Two is on £1,000 a week. Typically, they'll get £100 appearance or £100-200 a goal. Those can be sticking points. You think you've got a deal and then last minute, the agent will call and want some extras. One player wanted new socks for every game."
The pressure mounts as deadline day approaches, and the former chairman recalls a time when they were trying to sell their top goalscorer, a move which he believes would have allowed the club to push on for promotion with other players lined up.
"That was one of the most stressful," he said. "The player spoke to the club but they had to move on their [current] striker first, so they offered him a lower wage than he was expecting. He refused. But with a few hours to go, they sold their [current] player and went back to our guy with a vastly improved deal. He was stubborn and said no.
"I gave a bad radio interview to the BBC at the time and lost my composure. With hindsight, we should have paid [the outgoing striker] £25,000 to go and he was badly advised by his agent."
The Player
Michael Duberry trusted his agent implicitly. His agent knew exactly what the centre-half needed and he knew how to get it. Duberry, who played for Chelsea, Leeds United, Stoke City and Reading, among others, moved eight times in a 20-year career for fees totalling £5.3 million.
"I never had to worry about anything," Duberry says. "My agent took care of it. He knew I needed this and this and then a couple of days later, he says, 'It's done' and off you go to sign. The agent knows what to do. He knows what you need and how to get the best deal. You trust your agent."
Duberry admits that the transfer window is a frantic time for everyone bar the player, who will be told of possible interest from clubs before returning to focus on the job at hand.
"I don't know many players who got distracted by the transfer window," he said. "A lot of it is just rumours. If a club wants you, they get you. Your agent will say, 'Got a few clubs interested.' So for example, when I moved from Stoke in the Championship to Reading in the Premier League, he told me there might be something coming up.
"I think he said, 'Watford and Fulham are looking for a centre-back in the window' and that's as far as it went. So the agent is just letting you know and you think nothing of it. It doesn't concern you too much. You don't go in the changing room the next day and say you've got two or three clubs chasing you because a lot of the time nothing happens.
"Keep it to yourself. Within 48 hours, a deal might materialise. But you just get your head down."
Forty eight hours was as long as it took for Duberry to move to Reading in 2007 for £800,000.
"All my transfers were easy and that was particularly quick," he says. "I got a call from my agent, went in to see Tony Pulis [then-manager of Stoke], headed down south, met the chairman, and we did it within two days."
Duberry remembers many meetings with managers that ultimately led to nothing at all. "They talk about their ethos, the players they want to bring in and how you'd fit in. They'd show you around the training complex and that can be a big draw for a player."
But surely for the modern footballer, doesn't a move hinge on whether the money is right?
"I don't think so," Duberry says. "Players get accused of being greedy, don't they? But remember it's a short career. People outside of football seem more obsessed with money than those in it. I can tell you that when sorting out a transfer, the only time you speak about money is the day you do your contract and your bonuses. And that's it. Boom. It's not talked about. You get it right straightaway.
"Players don't talk about money in the dressing room and they don't get excited by a transfer window. No one is thinking, 'Someone big could come in for me.'
"OK, there are guys who need to get out and it's a blessing for them, but largely, the transfer window is for the fans. Or for Sky Sports with the guy outside the ground in the dark wondering why the light is still on in the secretary's office."
The Arbitrators
If the light is still on and there are whispers of the club trying to complete an international transfer, then there is a good chance that the secretary is inputting data into FIFA's international transfer matching system (TMS). No international transfer can be completed without being ratified by TMS.
It became mandatory in 2010 for all of FIFA's member associations. Before a transfer can categorically be called a "done deal" on Sky Sports' ticker, TMS has the final say. Each club must provide 30 matching types of data, such as fee, length of contract, financial arrangements of the contract and the intermediaries involved.
Completing the process takes each club seven to 10 minutes, and if the data does not match on both sides, TMS rejects the transfer and the clubs have to start again.
TMS was introduced to counter transfer corruption, such as money laundering and the transfers of underage players, as Mark Goddard, the general manager, told Bleacher Report.
"There were various reports about the susceptible nature of football to criminal behaviour," Goddard said. "It's a multi-billion pound industry and without any governance, it's susceptible to poor behaviour from those outside football. I don't think any system can solve that behaviour, but the idea was to make it harder to make obvious things to be done such as transferring imaginary players, using transfers to move money around."
Goddard and his team expect a busy January. "It's more intense than the summer window," he says. "Our record is 371 in one day, I think. When you think there's potentially 500 clubs involved in those transfers and up to 40 members associations, it can get busy.
"It would be a guess, but I think we could see about 4,000 transfers in this window."
Ed Hawkins has won the Sports Journalists' Association Betting Writer of the Year award for the last three years and the Wisden Almanack Book of the Year for Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy, his book on cricket-betting corruption. It was also shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
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