World Football: Have Contracts Become Null and Void?

I am a student who's doing his Bachelors degree in Commerce, and one of the most interesting papers I had to write last year was the one on Mercantile Law. I learnt about things like contracts, their characteristics, and how they can be breached.

Here's what I've learnt about a contract:

"It is an agreement that is enforceable by law."

Throw that definition out of the window! We're in the crazy world of football!

Though contracts are legally enforceable, players and agents are the monopolising power in football today. Players seem to want to leave if:

1) Their clubs don't pay them enough money—which is £80,000 per week for an average player these days.

2) Their clubs show no ambition—if they win very little or nothing for more than one year, and show no signs of doing so in the near future (or, so the players think).

The latter statement is a better reason to leave a club, but whatever a player says, he always seems to leave for the former.

So, when a player signs a four-year contract, there is no guarantee that he would be in the club for four years. The four years are more for the club who will have the security of a compensation from another club rather than that for a player who invariably moves on within those four years.

So, what's the point of signing a contract?

The player gets a heavy signing-on fee, and the club is wasting its resources on a player who they know won't remain with it for much longer. Then, some other club comes, pays the guy triple the amount that the club's paying, and takes him away from them.

The consolation? They get a compensation of... well, a lot of money.

But, despite the fact that you can buy anything with money, it is difficult to replace a player. The hours of work that managers and coaches put in with him, his knowledge of the domestic game, and the fact that he was settled (until a Spanish or an Italian club uses the press and other unfair means to sign him) means that even money can't replace that player immediately.

Why waste all that money? Why not just let the player play on a rolling contract?

That's what the crazy world of football seems to have become.

A place of no honour, a place of no commitment. Players come and go, make promises and leave right in front of your eyes, and you feel as if you've been shot in the knee-cap, and left without a way to recover from the blow.

Today, the Webster clause is applicable for players over 28 years of age who can leave in the last two years of their contract. But, Arsene Wenger, Arsenal's manager, feels that all this is going to cause anarchy for all the clubs very soon:

"At the moment, it's (the Webster Clause) either three years or two, but believe me, soon someone will challenge that and ask why at 28 years old and not, say, at 27," he said.

"And then, it will be why after two years and not one? Once you get to that stage, the transfer system is dead. You'd have a team built for a year—then you are in big trouble."

That would mean the end of club football. That would be the farcical scenario, one which all of us would laugh at today, but believe me when I say that we're not that far away from such a situation.

The fact that the transfer system is biased towards the players is ironical, since all of us keep saying, "No player is bigger than the club."

Cristiano Ronaldo won a Champions League and Premier League double and has decided to leave Manchester United. Mathieu Flamini was on the verge of winning the League title and played almost every game of his final season at Arsenal and somehow left for AC Milan.

While I acknowledge that Madrid and Milan are great clubs with stature—Man Utd and Arsenal are the future.

You can blame the agents for hyping up the transfers of their players, you can blame the players themselves for being greedy, or you can blame the clubs for being far too stingy.

But, for me, there is only one entity that anybody can blame—and that is FIFA.

The more I think about this scenario, the more I feel that FIFA is losing its grip on world football. It's concerned about the exploration of rules which cannot be enforced, and isn't doing anything to protect the football clubs.

Sepp Blatter can talk for hours about the six-plus-five legislation and yet, he doesn't seem to be concerned about the player-turnover at almost all the major clubs (and other clubs) in the world.

I have gone on forever about how I cannot believe that players would leave their clubs just for money and the fact that clubs are losing the very players they made, but the institution or association responsible for all of this seems to be turning a blind-eye to everything that is going on.

A contract is an agreement enforceable by law, right?

But, here's the pickle—there doesn't seem to be an agreement of any kind, and the law is being trampled over.

Therefore, I'm left with the following definition:

"A contract means nothing in football." Simple yet effective, won't you say?