SENTINELCELTS

Morning,all.

JOBO brings us today’s article,with a view on how complicated the setting of a transfer fee can be.

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Bobby’s article on Tuesday concerning the possible departures of Juranovic and Giakoumakis certainly sparked debate on these pages but one thing that appeared to be missing was in relation to the factors that feed into any likely transfer fees.

It’s inevitable and understandable that when we see some of the inflated transfer fees paid for fairly ordinary players then we rightly expect our own superstars to have similar price tags attached. And when one of our own performs so well during the world cup then figures of £20M and upwards seem entirely plausible. So why then do much more modest figures of £6M or £7M start to appear in the papers? I think that the answer lies in the fine details of individual contracts.

Now admittedly what follows is pure speculation on my part so please do feel free to tear the argument apart. But anyway, here’s how I imagine that most discussions go when any player is joining any top club, Celtic included.

As well as negotiating the transfer fee with the selling club, the new club and player have to agree terms on such things as the player’s basic salary, any performance related bonuses, any loyalty bonuses and, crucially, any release clause in the event that the player opts to cut his contract short and sign for someone else. So, when Celtic sign a new player it is obviously in their best interest to have any release clause pitched as high as possible, along the lines of “…should the player wish to terminate the 4 year contract early, any potential buying club must offer a transfer fee of at least £20M….”. But surely it’s not as simple as that? Wouldn’t aplayer’s agent then argue “well, if you rate this guy as being worth £20M it follows that his salary should reflect so how about doubling what you have offered as his basic wage…?” 

So, there’s bound to be a bit of give and take on both sides. If Celtic offer a new player even £20K per week for a 4-year contract the agent might argue that there should also be a release clause of say £5M. Or it might even be more detailed than that with the clause being “…if you want to leave during the first 18 months it’ll take a £15M offer, if it’s between 18 months and 3 years it’ll be £9M… etc etc…”

Of course, regardless of contracts and release clauses, players can potentially be sold at any time if the conditions and price are right. But usually that requires some sort of bidding war. 

So, taking Josip Juranovic as an example it is possible (I’ve really no idea!) that there’s a release clause of £8M and that’s the basis for the figures in the papers. And if a club has met that valuation AND if it’s a club that Josip is happy to go to (either because of the particular country he’d be playing in or because he’d get a huge increase in wages, etc) AND if there’s no interest from elsewhere then there’d be little Celtic could do unless we were prepared to ourselves offer a new, improved contract. However, if several clubs became interested after seeing Josip’s world cup displays and started tabling offers then we could then feasibly expect the offers to climb higher and higher to try to close the deal.

So, I suppose what I’m getting here is 2 things. Firstly, we shouldn’t be too critical of Celtic whenever we sell a player for a seemingly low fee. Without knowing the ins and outs of that player’s contract we simply don’t know whether Celtic could have done more to either retain the player or to secure a bigger transfer fee. And secondly, I’m not sure that the SMSM are any more informed than you or I. So, when they attach transfer fees to players sold (recent eyebrow raising ones include Patterson to Everton for £12M and Bassey to Ajax for £18M – really??) then I think that they too are simply guessing.

I never get hung up on transfer fees for Celtic players, whether incoming our outgoing. IN the past we’ve spent £6M on players that failed to live up to that price tag. On the other hand I do remember securing a young Swede for just £650,000, all because our new Dutch manager rememberedthat there was such a release clause in the player’s contract with Feyenoord!

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Above article gratefully received from JOBO