Summer 2023 Transfer Window - [Excluding Transfers to Saudi Arabia 25.07.23]

Shea Charles from Man city to Southampton for 10.5m plus add ons.

Thats Kovacic paid for after the sales of Charles and Trafford.

Great business.

City are just clever. you can't even get mad.

they've obviously been able to hugely bolster their academy, while also improving their stadium, while also keeping their first team squad the best in the world, but how they're using their academy is genuinely smart.

Chelsea will loan, which doesn't help for FFP.

United will have players on stupid wages that they can't move on.

City assess quickly if they think a player will break through or not. They have that many youth prospects now that they can pick the absolute best ones, but the ones that are very good (but not quite City level yet) will be turfed out, but they'll put generous buy-back clauses in them. that way, they're off the books, but they still have a handy option of getting them back if they turn out brilliant. And because they're brilliant at selling. James Trafford was brilliant for Bolton, and City haven't hesitated - they've been absolutely ruthless. They know he ain't getting ahead of Ederson or Ortega soon, but know that they can get a premium. And they do it.

Maybe United don't treat their academy as a business. They genuinely want players to develop and play for the club and give them every chance to do so.

Henderson should have been number 1 the last couple of seasons. Instead now they'll never know if he was good enough to make the step and also nearly wound up with extending the inadequate incumbent that he was due to replace. Terrible management of that whole situation.

His performances in December and January should be enough to still command a good fee as I think Cooper is very high on him and he was looking very good before the injury.

Do I have it correctly that when clubs sell academy players, they can book the full fee for FFP purposes, as it is a complete sale. But when they sell a player that was previously purchased, they can only book the financial valuation - so the value on the remaining contract?

I remember reading before that for example Chelsea can book the full Mount fee - €60m as that is pure profit, but when selling Mendy or Koulibaly, it would not be the €18m or €23m fees, but instead the proportion associated with the depreciated value on the contract after the purchase price was factored in.

Ultimately there aren’t too many other options, when you players way more than they can get elsewhere.

All played just enough to be thought of the next big thing. I remember the buzz around Piazon. All journeymen players but still making a decent living. They do that well Chelsea.

Chelsea played within the rules to a point. The rules were the problem. There was nothing stopping every club farming players and having them on endless loan cycles. Now, their relationship with some clubs maybe problematic specifically the dutch one.

There is some suggestion of impropriety though as they reportedly wanted Kante to be paid to an offshore account and he was like, grand, i've enough money.

City are doing some within rules and some out. UEFA and fifa need to clamp down on owners being able to own loads of clubs. Same for red bull . Being able to move players thoughout them and transferring wealth is just a way around ffp

Yeah, fair. Chelsea didn't break the rules as such they just exploited them before they were changed after being exploited. In a nutshell.

Possibly one rule being broken was the FFP one where they had a £1 billion debt to the owner written off as part of the sale last year. Other clubs don't have the luxury and received fines or restrictions for not complying with FFP. Chelsea had that £1 billion written off so overspent without repercussions.

In terms of exploiting rules, Chelsea have many examples.

In the PL, clubs are not allowed to sign underage players, unless they live within a 90 mins commute from the training ground. This is to to prevent kids travelling hours in every direction and disrupting their education etc, but also to protect smaller clubs who might have a star prospect. Obviously London clubs have an advantage here because of the large catchment area but what Chelsea did was set up loads of feeder academies around the the country where they then picked the best players to move to London at an older age once they were allowed to at the age threshold. For example how did Mason Mount (Portsmouth) end up at the Chelsea academy?

PL clubs are not allowed to give financial incentives to families to make their children sign for their clubs. Chelsea also exploited this rule by giving Stan Christensen (who had never previously worked as a football scout) a job in London as a scout, which meant that the family had to move there from Denmark. Coincidentally on the very same day that they moved country, his son Andreas signed for Chelsea. It's been alleged that Stan never performed any scouting job for Chelsea, but still received a salary.

An awful lot of those youth players ended up being part of the Chelsea "loan army" and some never played a game for Chelsea but were then sold on for big profits (in FFP terms) and were able to bankroll transfers for the first team. While this was within the rules at the time, they have now been changed because of the actions of Chelsea. They used to regularly have 10/15/20 players out on loan at any given time. The rule is now that a club can only loan out 7 players with this reducing to 6 next summer.

A lot of these loan players ended up at Vitesse Arnhem, who are now under investigation by Dutch authorities for the multi club singular ownerships issue. They were in European competition at the same time as Chelsea, and even though they said they were not owned by Abramovich, there is evidence to suggest that they actually were. There is a rule now about this being forbidden.

The most recent example being Chelsea handing out 7 or 8 year contracts on massive transfer fee signings so that they could exploit the Brexit / EU law on transfer fees being spread out over a certain number of years. While Chelsea didn't break any rule here, they were clearly exploiting a loophole which resulted in a rule change. There was other singular examples but none on the level that Chelsea were at. They

And then of course there was the transfer ban that Chelsea received for the way they used underage players. One example was how they convinced Bertrand Traore to leave a French club to play for them. They never registered the player but he played for them regularly. They only registered his signing years later when he would become 'legal'. Another reason was as players parents moving to a London for non-footballing reasons, just so their children could play for Chelsea.

Of course when they had the transfer ban, they also exploited this. It was not a transfer ban, it was more of a registration ban. So what they did was loaned Kovacic in the summer previous to the date they knew they the ban would be starting on so that they held his registration and would not need to register him. They also did this with Pulisic. They bought £100m worth of players in the summer of a transfer ban. Exploited the loophole again.

That's as close to cheating as you can get in many examples, with blatant cheating in other examples.

I'm no fan of Chelsea but finding loopholes isn't breaking the rules. Is it unsavoury? Sure but it's not illegal no matter if the loopholes where closed afterwards

I don't know, it's game of poker. They know Spurs want as much as possible, but they also know that next year Spurs will get nothing. And Spurs know that too of course and they know Bayern know etc.

I said it before I won't get my hopes up until its actually done but Bayern seem to be serious about this and they're no jokers for sure.

As for the claims that Kane wants it I dont know either. Your man Plettenberg seems a bit overly enthusiastic to be fully believable. I dont think Kane has actually spoken about anything which he wouldn't being the solid pro and gent he is.

Dont think Bayern or anyone will be paying that. He's Harry Kane yes but he's got one year left is all.

What do people think here? Are Spurs playing poker or are they really willing to let his contract run out and get nothing?

Bayern were happy enough to have Lewandoski in his 30s, I don't think Kane's age will scare them. Especially when he has never really relied on pace.

He would thrive in a league with even more space that he is used to getting / making.

Personally, I think he's better off just getting the PL record with Spurs but it's his choice. If he wants to go, he can force it and make Levy sell now rather than 0 next summer which can be agreed January 1st.

Could they not offer him a bumper contract with more wages. He's the spurs/England golden child. Cant see him leaving for free next summer, can levy put something on the table for him.

All depends on him ofc but just don't see it.

He's not even nearly good enough. His performances at Forest have illustrated that.

To make it worse, in the long run it didn't even make him more money. He's on 200k. So for the first two of the six years he was quite well paid comparatively speaking, but by the time the middle two years came around the standard wages of a high level striker had already risen to exceed that, and for the last two years of the deal he's just been straight out underpaid.

Yeah he was so bad they're going to make him one of the top 7 most expensive goalkeepers of all time.

He was great for them before getting injured, their defence fell off a cliff when he did.

A quick google suggests he is 47 goals shy of Shearers record of premier league goals. So that's atleast two very good seasons he needs to break it so your suggestion its a non runner for him unfortunately. It's either move on this summer or sign a new contract at spurs.

Of course it's all down to him what he wants, he can either go down the route of being the top scorer in the Premier league and won nothing in his career or move elsewhere and actually win stuff, and Bayern is a fabulous opportunity for that.

And being among the most expensive is meaningless. I'll point to pogba and Maguire. For goalkeepers, Pickford is among the most expensive and you certainly wouldn't want him

Plus Forrest haven't exactly had a sensible approach to transfers

He can go to Bayern for 3 years, compete for the CL a couple of times and then return to the Premier League and break the record in his late thirties. The record is not a real reason for him to stay any longer. This Spurs era is over, and everyone knows it.