Soccer Fans: Is the transfer system flawed?

[yavoon]

isnt the road from failure to success through the "farm" system or wutever u call it over there. I not sure if soccer is like baseball in that who is gna be good later is very obscure. or like basketball where the phenoms are pretty identifiable. my guess is actually the latter which hurts the idea.

but u guys have so many nations playing u can't put it under one system like we can and put a cap on salaries and build a free agency market. so teams just communicate in the universal currency, money.

[MikeH]

The youth systems are really important for English football. As someone said, the best players might go to the best clubs from there but these academies are still producing really good players who go to other clubs. Matthew Upson at Birmingham for instance.

[yavoon]

yes but thats not exactly my point. my point is u go from bad to good by finding the good players and riding them up then uc an trade them for money. or what have you. a good farm system in baseball like the oakland A's can produce a great team w/o a big budget.

but I guess futball doesnt work like that.

[MikeH]

Yeah, it does. The Posh (Peterborough United) have had a great youth system for years and have kept the club alive by sellling players on. A fair proportion of the current ManU first team is made of home grown players. Scholes, Beckham, Giggs, the two Nevilles, Brown etc.

Scholes, Beckham and Giggs would set you back what, £70 million?

[Jay Bee]

Originally posted by FrustratedPoet
Would people have been happier with yet another Real Madrid victory? Who needs that?
(Well, Jay Bee would have liked to see it I suppose )

You supposed well, sire. Very, very well

[CerberusIV]

The two things that are messing up the transfer system are the gulf in money terms between D1 and the Premier League and that players become free agents at the end of their contracts (Eurocrats ).

The gap in money means that some teams gamble on expensive players and salary bills to get into the PL or qualify for the Champions League but then have a big crisis if they don't make it. Losing out in the D1 playoffs can be a major disaster that a club can take years to recover from - often because their best players then leave for Premiership clubs.

No transfer fee at the end of contracts means it is in a clubs interest to sell a big name player part way through his contract so there is an artificially high turnover of top players. This means a lot of money circulating in the Premiership with a bit trickling down to D1 but not that much getting down to the lower division clubs, unlike perhaps 10 or 15 years ago.

I don't think there is an easy way to go back to how it used to be, or even if that is a good idea. What might be an idea would be to levy a percentage amount on the sale of players from all clubs and spread that money down to the smaller clubs.

[MikeH]

Why shouldn't footballers have exactly the same freedom of employment as everyone else?

What would you say if you weren't allowed to leave your current job for a better one/location move whatever until your boss agreed that they'd let you go?

[Az]

That's just a freedom they lose for the enormous amounts of cash they get.

[alva]

We used to have a system to enforce this in England, but it was ruled illegal under European employment law. Blame Brussels.

And it started with a Belgian calle Bosman...

In fact British clubs were scr*wed twice on this one.
Before you could have Scottisch, Welsh..etc players in english teams (more then 3 ), then Fifa or UEFA decided that was irregular and that they should be considered as foreigners.
Just when you made the transitition, suddenly you could have players from the whole Europe.

Still, some kind of gentlemens agreement would be nice and good for long-term (survival/growth of football). Not that it is going to happen of course.
(And with Italian and Spanish countries handing out passports to South-American players it is becoming a joke IMO)

Like Leeds, we had one or two teams here featuring no belgians anymore (something like 9 africans and 3 east-europeans were fielded.)

[MikeH]

I knew it was Bossman's fault.

[Worthingtons]

Yes. Fulham moved from D3 to Premiership in less than 10 years. Man City were in the second division 3 or 4 seasons ago. Brighton moved from D3 to D1 in 2 seasons (although they then struggled). Plenty of examples of that.

You forgot to Include Rotherham who also moved from Division 3 to Division 1 in 2 seasons, and STAYED there, Last season we finished only about 10 points off the playoffs (in fact we were top at one point!) and therefore went close to the final promotion, that would have been 3 promotions in 4 seasons, so it's possible, although very unlikely.

Sorry I didnt explain my thoughts very well Imran but the Transfer system is(or was) a very exciting part of our game, off the field transfer talk in football can sometimes be as exciting as on the field action

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by Worthingtons
the Transfer system is(or was) a very exciting part of our game, off the field transfer talk in football can sometimes be as exciting as on the field action

The same is true in Baseball. Changing to a system of trades instead of purchases wouldn't remove this excitement.

[Worthingtons]

It would for Smaller Clubs FP, since the excitment would involve our best players handing in 1 month's notice to move to some bigger club, maybe sometimes there'd be a compensation fee involved.

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by Worthingtons
It would for Smaller Clubs FP, since the excitment would involve our best players handing in 1 month's notice to move to some bigger club, maybe sometimes there'd be a compensation fee involved.

Perhaps, but you'd still be able to sit in the pub with your mates and talk all night about "If our team traded player X to team Y for players Z and Q then we could strengthen our shakey defence"
That's not much different from saying "If we sell player X for ?? million pounds then we might be able to bring in players Z and Q with that money, which would really help us out".

[Footie Mad]

But since football (or soccer) has a world wide market, and the items of trade are actually living people. It would be very hard to arrange for trades between countries, or are players just supposed to move to african, south american, asian and european countries whenever the clubs tell them to?

Players do that now but they are sold separately and no exchange of players is needed. Then again you could just close the foreign market.