The General Football Thread

Blues Forever · October 6, 2020

Cafu or Carlos Alberto will most likely win this. Suurbier and Kaltz also shouldn't belong in the list. Shocking omission on Zanetti and Amoros.

Blues Forever · October 6, 2020

Yashin, Buffon, or Neuer will win this. Nkono, Van Der Sar, and Casillas shouldn't belong in the list. Shocking omission on Dasayev, Shilton, and Kahn.

Atomiswave · October 6, 2020

How is JT and Peter not in those lists? If Van dar sar is there then Peter should def be too.

killer1257 · October 6, 2020

Maldini will win easily, no idea why they put Breitner in the list when he was better as a CM.

Ramos? Why Ramos? I can think of at least 10 CBs that are not on the list that were better than fucking Ramos lol

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Blues Forever · October 6, 2020

13 minutes ago, killer1257 said:

Ramos? Why Ramos? I can think of at least 10 CBs that are not on the list that were better than fucking Ramos lol

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Even Koeman included in the list lol, a bit baffling to see.

Fulham Broadway · October 6, 2020

Three Liverpool players with Covid now

Fulham Broadway · October 6, 2020

So Arsenal have made their mascot redundant - maybe £350 000 a week Ozil could do it, as hes doing fuck all else....?

NikkiCFC · October 6, 2020

11 hours ago, Blues Forever said:

Beckenbauer or Baresi will win this easily. Ramos, Koeman, and Desailly shouldn't belong in the list. Shocking omission on Nesta, Figueroa, and Kohler.

I think it is really hard to compare players from so different periods. I think football is on completely different level now and much more professional than 30-40 years ago.

Training is different, nutrition etc...

Blues Forever · October 6, 2020

42 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

I think it is really hard to compare players from so different periods. I think football is on completely different level now and much more professional than 30-40 years ago.

Training is different, nutrition etc...

Indeed, it's really hard to compare players from different periods. However, this doesn't mean current player like Ramos suddenly better than Baresi or Beckenbauer. Even without modern training or nutrition, both of them had maintained top performances as a defender for a long time and arguably left a bigger legacy in football than Ramos.

NikkiCFC · October 7, 2020

Atomiswave · October 7, 2020

26 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

Is he crazy or what, corners that go out of play but swing in should be valid? FFS keep it simple man, all these new rules or supposed rules are BS. Stop messing with it for no damn reason.

Vesper · October 8, 2020

CIES Football Observatory Monthly Report
n°58 - October 2020

COVID only braked the inflation of players’ transfer prices

While the COVID pandemic has brought a considerable drop in the level of investments on the transfer market, footballers signed for money by big-5 league teams during the last transfer window were paid on average 6% more than players with similar characteristics during the summer 2019. The full CIES Football Observatory analysis is available in the 58th edition of the Monthly Report.

During the last transfer window, clubs from the five major European leagues invested 43% less in transfer indemnities to sign new players compared to summer 2019. The minimal fall was recorded in the English Premier League (from €1.65 to €1.49 billion, -10%), while the maximum was measured in the Spanish Liga (from €1.40 billion to €348 million, -75%).

The percentage of free transfers among all players taken on permanently by big-5 league clubs has significantly increased: from 26.2% to 32.2%. The percentage of players recruited on loan out of all signings went also up: from 23.1% to a record 30.0%. The COVID pandemic has also reinforced the tendency for teams to integrate conditional payments and sell-on percentages into the transactions.

The COVID crisis has strongly impacted the probability that players are signed for money. However, if a transfer takes place, the hypothesis according to which the price would have been negotiated to a lower level than before the pandemic does not hold true. In this regard, the most marking impact of the pandemic resides in the slowing down of the rampant inflation of players’ prices: from 15% on average per year between 2015 and 2019, down to 6% between 2019 and 2020.

The real impact of COVID on the football players’ transfer market

https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/mr/mr58/en/

1. Introduction

Since the propagation of COVID, speculations on the consequences of the virus on the professional football economy have been widespread. For the first time, this report studies the real impact of the pandemic on the footballers’ transfer market.

The study compares the transactions carried out during the last transfer period by the teams of the five major European championships (Premier League, Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1) with those concluded since January 2010. The comparison covers three areas: the volume of investments, the typology of transfers (permanent, temporary, free, paid, etc.) and the price of players.

2. Volume of investments

This chapter retraces the evolution of the sums spent on transfer indemnities (including add-ons) by the big-5 league teams since January 2010. The analysis by calendar year gives an initial idea of the impact of COVID on the volume of investments. The value measured in 2020 is indeed 30% lower than that observed in the record year of 2019.

By isolating the summer transfer windows, the same analysis shows even more clearly the effect of the pandemic on the volume of investments. In this case, the drop in comparison with summer 2019 is 43%. Though a record amount for the winter transfer periods was invested in 2020, the spending incurred for big-5 league teams during the last transfer window was down at the level recorded in 2016.

The analysis of the sums spent on the transfer market during the summer period per league shows the particular status of the Premier League: its clubs constantly are the most extravagant. Moreover, the drop recorded between 2019 and 2020 in the English top division was significantly lower than that observed in the other four big-5 league championships: -10% in comparison to an average of -54%.

3. Transfer typology

A second way of studying the actual impact of COVID on the transfer market consists of comparing the recruitment methods for players signed by big-5 league teams. In this vein, we have calculated the percentage of paid transfers among players signed permanently.

During the last transfer window, 32.3% of players signed by big-5 league teams were recruited without paying a transfer fee. During the summer 2019 transfer period, this percentage was only 26.2%. The increase in the proportion of free transfers among new signings after the COVID crisis was particularly strong in the Spanish Liga and the German Bundesliga.

The pandemic has also reinforced the tendency for teams from the top five European championships to take on players based on a loan formula. During the last transfer window, 30.0% of new players of big-5 league clubs were recruited temporarily. In the summer of 2019, this proportion was only 23.1%.

4. Price of players

Due to the lack of incomes related to COVID, a recurring hypothesis stated that transfer indemnities would have been negotiated to lower levels than in the past. This hypothesis can be verified thanks to the algorithm for transfer values exclusively developed by the CIES Football Observatory research group.

Indeed, among the numerous variables included into this algorithm, there is one for the season in which the transfer took place. From this variable, we can follow the evolution over time of prices, all things being equal. Contrary to the hypotheses of many experts, this analysis shows that COVID has not led to a drop in the level of fees for players transferred.

During the last transfer window, big-5 league clubs invested about 6% more than in summer 2019 to sign footballers with the same characteristics. From this point of view, the pandemic will only have served to put a little brake on the galloping inflation observed between 2015 and 2019 (15% per year on average).

While prices all things being equal continued to increase despite the COVID crisis, the latter has reinforced the importance of conditional payments in the transfer of players. This strategy allows buyer clubs to lower the risks associated with transfers by spending additional money only if the player gives satisfaction or if the results obtained are positive.

Together with the recourse to add-ons, we have observed a generalisation of the trend to include a sell-on percentage for the future transaction, sometimes even when the transfer is carried out without indemnity following a breach of contract. This strategy permits seller clubs to obtain substantial profits also on the successive transfer of a player released and, in a context of limited cash flow, it is also interesting for recruiting clubs to lower the up-front purchase price.

5. Conclusion

As predicted, the COVID pandemic has brought a considerable drop in the level of investments on the transfer market. In comparison to summer 2019, the drop observed during the last transfer window for the five top European championships was 43%, with a minimal fall in England (-10%) and a maximum in Spain (-75%).

During the last transfer window, the percentage of free transfers among all of the players taken on permanently by big-5 league clubs has significantly increased in comparison to summer 2019 (from 26.2% to 32.2%). The biggest rise was observed in Bundesliga (+15%), while the proportion remains stable in Premier League (-1%). The percentage of players recruited on loan out of all signings went also up (from 23.1% to 30.0%).

The COVID crisis has thus strongly impacted the probability that players are subject to a paid transfer. However, if a transfer takes place, the hypothesis according to which the price would have been negotiated to a lower level than before the pandemic does not hold true. Footballers signed for money by big-5 league teams during the last transfer window were paid on average about 6% more than players with similar characteristics during the summer 2019.

With regard to the price of players, the most marking impact of the pandemic resides in the slowing down of the rampant inflation observed between 2015 and 2019 (on average 15% per year with a peak of 26% for 2017). The COVID crisis has also reinforced the tendency for teams to integrate conditional payments and sell-on percentages into the transactions.

Vesper · October 8, 2020

A director of football won’t always work – but can cut deadline-day gambles

https://theathletic.com/2109910/2020/10/07/kay-deadline-day-gambles-director-of-football/

“The fans were on my back to have a director of football, a big-name manager. We did what the fans wanted. It didn’t work.”

And, with that, David Sullivan concluded that West Ham United could live without a director of football. We tried it. It didn’t work. Back to the old way of doing things, where the co-chairman ran the show to such an extent Karren Brady once said he “in effect takes a football director role in helping to select and negotiate all football transfers”.

That’s the thing about the director-of-football model. Some clubs swear by it, but others are sure they are better off without. These tend to be the clubs you see scrambling around in desperation in the final days of almost every transfer window, not just tying up a few loose ends but going off in radically different directions, trying and often failing to pull off deals that they would not even have contemplated a couple of weeks earlier.

“What the transfer deadline gives you is a clear indication of which are the badly run football clubs,” Gary Neville tweeted on August 31, 2012, the final day of a transfer window that was most notable for Queens Park Rangers’ series of ill-judged vanity signings, the sense of turmoil at Liverpool (where new manager Brendan Rodgers was furious that Fenway Sports Group could not complete a deal for Fulham’s Clint Dempsey) and, of course, a couple of late punts by West Ham (Andy Carroll and Yossi Benayoun on loan).

Eight years on, little has changed at West Ham — except that this time, having been frustrated in their pursuit of James Tarkowski, they hit a series of blanks in their search for the central defender that was David Moyes’s priority from the moment the transfer window opened. Enquiries about Bayer Leverkusen’s Jonathan Tah, Marseille’s Duje Caleta-Car and Chelsea’s Antonio Rudiger came to nothing and, although Sullivan agreed to meet Chelsea’s demands to take Fiyako Tomori on loan, the defender pulled out of the deal 10 minutes before the deadline.

Manchester United, meanwhile, announced no fewer than four new signings in the hours before Monday night’s deadline — Alex Telles, Edinson Cavani, Facundo Pellistri and, subject to work permit before his proposed arrival in January, Amad Diallo — and, depending on your view of such things, this was either a) a supreme vindication of the philosophy and structure that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and their executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward maintain they have got right over the past 18 months or so or another of those frantic trolley dashes that have come to characterise the Woodward era at Old Trafford.

Woodward, like Sullivan, is a sceptic when it comes to the idea of a director of football, or at least when it comes to the suggestion that his club needs one. He was certain they did two years ago, when he was at loggerheads with Jose Mourinho, but then along came Solskjaer, a more collegiate approach, a new “technical board” and the frequent declarations that, with Ole at the wheel and almost £200 million spent on Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Harry Maguire, Daniel James and Bruno Fernandes last season, they now had the clear vision and the top-class structure they had been missing for years.

Thrashing around in the final days and hours of the transfer window, though, having missed out on your top target, is never a great look. Sometimes it is unavoidable because of market forces, but Manchester United’s late flurry came from the belated realisation that they had severely misjudged the strength of Borussia Dortmund’s resolve over Jadon Sancho, their prime target long before the window opened. They will try to convince themselves, their shareholders and their supporters that the signings of Telles, Cavani, Pellistri and Diallo are evidence that, to quote Woodward in the disastrous summer of 2014, “we can do things in the transfer market that other clubs can only dream of”. Their previous record demands serious scepticism.

Historically, West Ham love a late deal. In their first transfer window after buying the club in 2010, Sullivan and David Gold signed three centre-forwards on deadline day (Benni McCarthy for £2.25 million, Mido on loan and Ilan on a free transfer) who went on to score a total of four goals for the club. There were six new faces signed in the final week of the summer window in 2011 (Sam Baldock, Brian Montenegro, Papa Bouba Diop, David Bentley, Henri Lansbury and Guy Demel) and another three (Ravel Morrison, Ricardo Vaz Te and Nicky Maynard) on deadline day the following January.

On and on it goes. Michail Antonio and, rather less successfully, Alex Song, Victor Moses and Nikica Jelavic joined in the space of eight hours on deadline day in September 2015. A year later it was a 33-year-old Alvaro Arbeloa arriving on a free transfer from Real Madrid, three days after Simone Zaza joined on loan from Juventus. January 2018 brought Jordan Hugill (three appearances for West Ham, no goals) in a projected £10 million move from Preston North End. For every deadline-day success, such as Antonio in 2015 or Jarrod Bowen last January, there is a long list of failures. And while there was no late deal for West Ham this time, it certainly wasn’t for want of trying.

This column isn’t really about West Ham, where the bleak early-season mood has improved considerably with mightily impressive victories over Wolverhampton Wanderers and Leicester City over the past week. It isn’t really about Manchester United either. It’s more about what Sullivan said in that recent talkSPORT interview, dismissing the director-of-football model as casually as if it was just another of those pre-deadline deals for a well-travelled South American striker with a questionable fitness record but a familiar agent. “We tried it. It didn’t work.”

Did they really try it, though? The man they appointed in June 2018 was Mario Husillos, who came highly recommended by Manuel Pellegrini when they were hiring the Chilean as their new head coach. That’s not how it is supposed to work. In announcing Husillos’s appointment, West Ham trumpeted his success alongside Pellegrini at Malaga, recruiting players such as Guillermo Ochoa, Javier Saviola and Roque Santa Cruz. Fine, but the three of them were 29, 30 and 31 respectively and if there was one thing West Ham didn’t need any help with, it was signing players whose best years were behind them.

Sullivan declared Husillos “will take complete strategic control of all player recruitment”. He ended up saying he regretted giving Husillos the freedom to buy the likes of Felipe Anderson, Andriy Yarmolenko, Carlos Sanchez and Roberto, adding that the two best signings over that 18-month period, Lukasz Fabianski and Issa Diop, were his own recommendations and that he had to “bully” Pellegrini into taking them. (The co-chairman has never been shy of taking the credit on those rare occasions when West Ham get a deal right.)

So yes — even if we apply the Damien Comolli principle (as seen at Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool) and say that a director of football’s work is sometimes better judged with the benefit of several years’ hindsight — it is easy to see why West Ham called time on the Husillos experiment. But to write off the entire model? That’s as baffling as when Mike Ashley’s Newcastle United regime scrapped the position based on their short-lived appointments of Dennis Wise in 2008 and Joe Kinnear in 2013.

Let’s look at another case. Within two months of buying Aston Villa in 2018, Naseef Sawiris and Wes Edens hired Jesus Garcia Pitarch to be their sporting director. He came with a good reputation, forged at Valencia and Atletico Madrid, but his transfer record with Villa was poor. While the manager Dean Smith was credited with the successful signings of Tyrone Mings and Ezri Konsa, the sporting director was damned for the struggles of Mbwana Samatta, Marvelous Nakamba and Wesley. Garcia Pitarch left under a cloud at the end of last season, the day after survival in the Premier League was secured.

Smith could easily have sensed an opportunity for a power grab. Christian Purslow, the chief executive, could easily have decided, like Sullivan, that he didn’t need a so-called specialist in recruitment and long-term strategy. But they didn’t. They recruited Johan Lange from FC Copenhagen as their new sporting director with a remit to “strengthen” their “analytics, sports science, talent recruitment and player development programmes”. And while it is far too early to judge the new man — and this summer’s intake, including Emiliano Martinez from Arsenal, Matty Cash from Nottingham Forest and Ollie Watkins from Brentford, was very much a collaborative effort, with Smith having a significant input — the early indications are of a club with a renewed sense of purpose and unity, moving in the right direction.

Liverpool came to a similar conclusion when they relieved Comolli of his duties as director of football in 2012. Rather than abandon the model, they regrouped — literally so, with the formation of a new “committee” to work on recruitment and all strategic decisions — before Michael Edwards, the director of technical performance and analysis, made such a powerful impression that he was promoted to technical director and then sporting director, a role in which he has excelled over the past four years.

Technical director, sporting director, director of football… so many different job titles, so much confusion and suspicion in English football — still — about what it means. “I never understand what it means, director of football,” Arsene Wenger said in 2017, channelling his inner Paul Merson. “Is it someone who stands on the road and directs the players left and right?”

Wenger was once renowned as the most sophisticated mind in English football, but he rarely sounded more outdated than the day he reacted to headlines about Arsenal’s attempts to modernise their structure. “I’m manager of Arsenal and as long as I am manager, I will decide what happens on the technical front,” he said.

Football doesn’t work that way anymore. Long before Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson moved on from Arsenal and Manchester United respectively, they were the last of a breed of a manager who expected to control the entire football department. Some excel on the training pitch and others in the dressing room, but the widespread acceptance throughout the game is that a head coach or manager can no longer run the show from top to bottom. The job has changed dramatically since it entailed looking after 20-30 professionals and a small backroom staff, when scouting a potential signing meant getting in the car, driving the motorway and making one or two personal checks on a player before pleading with the board to wrap up a seven-figure deal.

Jurgen Klopp, who previously worked with the excellent Michael Zorc at Borussia Dortmund and now works with Edwards at Liverpool, swears by the model. So does Pep Guardiola, who would not even have come to Manchester City had it not been for the friendly, persuasive presence of his former Barcelona team-mate Txiki Begiristain as director of football.

Mauricio Pochettino is an interesting case. Few would dispute that most of Tottenham’s best signings of recent years (Toby Alderweireld, Dele Alli, Son Heung-min, Kieran Trippier) came when Paul Mitchell, recruited from Southampton on his request, was there as head of recruitment between 2014 and 2016, but when Mitchell left for RB Leipzig, the coach was resistant to the idea of replacing him.

Mitchell is one of those strategy and recruitment specialists whose stock has risen dramatically over the past decade, a former MK Dons player who, after retiring through injury at the age of 27, took charge of the club’s recruitment before moving on to Southampton, Tottenham, Leipzig and now Monaco. Another is Stuart Webber, a former academy coach at Wrexham who went from Liverpool to Wolves to QPR to Huddersfield Town to Norwich City, his reputation as a strategist rising everywhere he went.

Then there is Dan Ashworth, who left West Bromwich Albion to become the FA’s director of elite development for six years before returning to club football in 2018 as director of football at Brighton & Hove Albion, where he has overseen the appointment of Graham Potter and a change in style and transfer policy. Matt Crocker, who worked under Ashworth at the FA, has made a strong impression since joining Southampton as director of football operations earlier this year.

Mitchell, Webber and Ashworth are among those who have been linked with the (notional) vacancy at Manchester United. But the line that has come out of Old Trafford repeatedly is that hiring a director of football or a sporting director or a technical director — because in England the three titles seem interchangeable, even if the precise roles can vary enormously depending on the club in question — would not be a “silver bullet”.

Well, of course not. Because they could get it wrong. They could hire a highly-qualified candidate and end up with personality clashes, power struggles or, simply, bad deals. Monchi, widely regarded as one of the best in the business on the strength of his remarkable recruitment record with Sevilla from 2000 until 2017, was regarded as a disaster at AS Roma. He is now back at Sevilla, but his experience in Rome underlines that, whether for a player, coach, manager or director of football, there is no guarantee that your skills will translate from one club to the next.

But doesn’t that principle underline the unpredictability of the football industry as a whole? And isn’t the purpose of the director-of-football model to find a specialist who can establish a way in which risks are reduced, gambles become more educated and, crucially, the club establish a vision that goes beyond the shelf life of the man in the dugout so that you are not facing a change in outlook and personnel (playing and non-playing) every time results take a turn for the worse?

Manchester United believe they now have that model. But it goes back to something else Neville said on Sky Sports last January, stating that the club has “needed for a number of years (to) put best-in-class football operators into that club — and they’re not doing it”. Their technical committee includes Solskjaer, Mike Phelan, Nicky Butt, Marcel Bout, Mick Court and John Murtough and is overseen by Woodward, who then entrusts Matt Judge, a fellow financier, to negotiate with clubs, agents and players. Best in class? A generous assessment would be, “Could do better”.

At West Ham, Moyes has made clear that he believes the club needs an expert to oversee recruitment. For now, though, it is largely overseen by Sullivan. After 27 years in football, he is far more clued up and better connected than many owners and chairmen in the modern game. But wouldn’t it be better to appoint a specialist who really knows the game — the modern game — rather than just knowing the industry?

Monchi told the Daily Telegraph last week he finds it unfathomable that some leading clubs, mostly in England, operate without such a figure. “Where 60 to 70 per cent of the budget is allocated to the first team, if you don’t have a specialist who deals with that, it’s very difficult to understand,” he said. “I think clubs, more and more, are aware that they really need this position and also we are the connection between the technical staff, the squad, the board. We know the market. We get lots of information through the different scouts.”

Sullivan gets a lot of information through agents. But is it reliable information? Has it served him well down the years? At times yes, but often no. Woodward has also learned a few painful lessons when it has come to putting too much faith in the word of certain agents, particularly late in the transfer window when the pressure to get something done has been at its most intense.

A director of football doesn’t just exist for the benefit of those frantic final days of trading, though. The whole idea is that recruitment and long-term planning becomes a process rather than a succession of knee-jerk reactions. The idea is that you go into a transfer window with a clear strategy, identifying your main priorities and signing your main targets in those positions rather than end up in another of those scrambles as the days and hours tick down.

Manchester City’s window has been far from their most impressive, but they managed to sign Nathan Ake, Ferran Torres and Ruben Dias with time to spare. Likewise Liverpool, with the additions of Thiago Alcantara and Diogo Jota. Aston Villa, Brighton and others got their business done early. Even Everton, Newcastle and Tottenham looked in control of things. At Manchester United, by contrast, nothing is smooth and, after all those talks for Ismaila Sarr and Ousmane Dembele as alternatives to Sancho, the end-result was unconvincing as far as evidence of long-term vision and strategy was concerned.

There is also the issue of rectifying the mistakes made in previous windows and moulding the squad into the kind of lean, hungry group that will please the finance director as much as the manager. If you had told Solskjaer after the Europa League semi-final defeat by Sevilla six weeks ago that his squad on October 7 would still include Phil Jones, Marcos Rojo and Jesse Lingard — but not Sancho — he would have been disappointed. But surprised? Shocked? Probably not.

Of course, a director of football is not guaranteed to work. It didn’t work for West Ham with either Husillos or Gianluca Nani, whose 18-month stint at the club ended soon after the Sullivan and Gold takeover. But how rigorous was the selection process in either case? If it wasn’t rigorous enough, doesn’t that really underline the point that the club in question needs to be stronger when it comes to vision and recruitment?

A director of football isn’t a silver bullet. It never could be. And, of course, there is self-interest in statements such as Monchi’s. Some might say there is self-interest in standing in the way of progress but, when it comes down to it, surely there has to be a recognition that outside help is needed. Because whatever both West Ham and Manchester United are doing at the moment, it looks far from “best in class”.

Vesper · October 12, 2020

Explained: Why a US entertainment giant has bought the biggest football agency

https://theathletic.com/2126770/2020/10/11/footballers-influencers-icmpartners-stellar-agency/

Lockdown was a drag for footballers in terms of their day jobs, even for the ones with huge gardens, but it was a different story for their sidelines in content creation.

Sergio Aguero turned into a gaming sensation, Robert Lewandowski taught the world to dance and Alphonso Davies tried to singlehandedly lift the mood, one minute at a time, via his TikTok account. All three added millions to their already impressive social media followings, giving them even bigger platforms to influence our choices on what games to download, music to play and onesies to wear.

Famous people have always been influencers, there is nothing new about that, but footballers have never been this famous before or had as many different outlets for the fame their feet has brought them. Books, documentaries, movie cameos, podcasts, reality TV: there is nothing the modern player cannot do, which is why they become key assets in one of the world’s growth industries.

City Football Group chief executive Ferran Soriano might have misread the room (and forgotten his club’s not-too-distant history) this week when he suggested the answer to the English Football League’s cashflow crisis might be more Manchester Citys but he nailed “the very basic investment thesis” that is driving his industry.

“The world is a place with six, seven, eight billion people and the majority are middle class — that’s different from 30 years ago but it’s a reality today — and these people need to be entertained,” Soriano told a virtual audience during a Leaders Week question-and-answer session on Wednesday. “So the business of entertainment will grow and sport is a fundamental part of entertainment and football is the number one sport.”

We did not need to wait long for further proof of football’s growing importance within the global media-entertainment complex. The following day one of the world’s largest talent agencies, ICM Partners, bought the biggest football agency, Stellar Group, to create ICM Stellar Sports. Beyonce, Michael Keaton and Samuel L Jackson, allow me to introduce you to your new stablemates, Gareth Bale, Ben Chilwell and Jack Grealish.

Founded in Los Angeles in 1975, ICM is a very big deal in books, films, music and television. It represents the estates of American literary heavyweights such as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, it looks after the producers and writers who gave us Breaking Bad, Frasier, Friends and Sex and the City, while championing the careers of comedians Ellen DeGeneres, Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld.

But until Thursday, it did not do sports. Which is why ICM’s boss Chris Silbermann called Stellar chairman Jonathan Barnett last Christmas to see if it was too late to have a chat with him. Silbermann, you see, had heard on the grapevine that Barnett was thinking about selling Stellar, an agency he had started in 1994 on his kitchen table in London with business partner David Manasseh, to one of ICM’s rivals.

As ICM had just sold a minority stake to New York-based private equity firm Crestview for $150 million, Barnett thought a chat was the very least Silbermann deserved and told him he was on holiday in Miami if he wanted to join him. A day later the pair were hitting it off over lunch and the deal, bar nine months of hammering out the details, was done.

Barnett and Manasseh are now the executive chairmen of ICM Stellar Sports, where they will be joined by the rest of their Stellar colleagues and clients, the latter numbering 800 footballers, cricketers, rugby players and track and field stars.

Named by Forbes magazine as football’s number one agent last year, Barnett has been doing deals so long he cannot remember his first client but it was probably a cricketer. His first big client was definitely a cricketer, West Indies superstar Brian Lara, but it was not until he oversaw Bale’s record-breaking £85 million move to Real Madrid in 2013 that he and Stellar really went stratospheric.

Seven of the England football squad who beat Wales on Thursday are Stellar men and the group had already dipped its toes into the North American market with the signings of New Orleans Saints quarterback Jameis Winston and New York Giants safety Xavier McKinney.

Why sell now, then?

“ICM is a magnificent media and entertainment agency and they don’t do things by halves,” Barnett explains. “They wanted to build a powerful sports division and that’s where we come in. We’re already number one in football, the world’s favourite sport, and now we’re going to develop our NFL business and get into NBA and all kinds of other sports.

“That’s what excited me. I can afford a suit or two these days and I drive a better car than the Honda, with a door hanging off, that I was driving when I started Stellar but I feel 70 years young and I want to build a new agency.

“Not from my kitchen table, I’m too old for that, but from a position of strength.”

While Barnett and Manasseh have signed long-term contracts to run the new agency on a day-to-day basis, oversight of the business will be provided by chairman Ted Chervin, managing director of ICM Partners’ main business and as much of a legend in his own field as Barnett is in his.

A Harvard-educated lawyer, Chervin started off prosecuting criminals in New York before he got into the agency business, going from boxing, with the likes of James “Lights Out” Toney and Manny Pacquiao, to books. He was a named partner with Silbermann in a literary agency bought by ICM in 2006, and has spent most of the last decade running ICM’s television stable.

So why sports, why a UK-based agency and why Stellar?

“We’ve been working with athletes as they moved into sportscasting but we’ve wanted to really get into sports for a while,” says Chervin, speaking to The Athletic via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles.

“There are two ways you can start a new business. You can build organically, perhaps by bringing someone in or by promoting from within and giving them more responsibility, but that’s a slow process. We wanted to move quicker. We wanted a partner, who shared our values, ambition and entrepreneurial culture. That’s Stellar. They’re right at the top of their game and with them you get their expertise, excellence and access.

“We want to start up here (his hand level with his forehead) and get to here (six inches above his head). Stellar already has soccer, track and field, rugby and early steps in NFL, and we’re going to expand all of that, and get into the NBA, maybe baseball, and golf and tennis, if the right opportunity arises.”

From a business perspective, the deal makes sense.

US interest in investing in English football is also particularly buoyant at the moment, with American-listed firms such as RedBall Acquisition Corp — of which former Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore is chairman — having raised $575 million (almost £440 million) in August. Chinese investment is dwindling and US investors appear to want to fill the gap. The English market is appealing given valuations generally do not match the astronomical figures of US sports and there is a greater possibility of achieving a minority stake.

COVID-19 has hit ICM hard though, as television and movie production has stalled, forcing the company to shed nearly 10 per cent of its workforce. Diversifying into new markets should, in theory, create some growth again, although sport has not been immune from the pandemic’s impact.

The Premier League’s clubs might have combined to spend more than £1.2 billion on new players, a staggering sum all things considered, but that was still down on previous seasons and the market was significantly weaker elsewhere in Europe.

Stellar’s profits were actually falling even before COVID-19 struck, as it made £11.5 million in 2018 but less than £5 million last year. That said, one or two deals can move the needle pretty quickly and Bale’s return to Spurs and Chilwell’s £50 million move from Leicester to Chelsea should have brought in a couple of decent commissions.

More worrying, perhaps, is FIFA’s attempts to curtail the amount of money agents make from transfers. World football’s governing body was stung into action by the revelations from Football Leaks, the website set up by Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto in 2015 that led to a series of newspaper investigations between 2016 and 2018, and eventually a book.

It was from these leaks that the world learned Bale’s transfer to Real Madrid was a world record, beating Cristiano Ronaldo’s move to the same club from Manchester United, and that Italian agent Mino Raiola earned £41 million from Paul Pogba’s transfer from Juventus to United.

FIFA’s proposal, which has been backed by the European Commission, is to limit the agent of a selling club to 10 per cent of the fee, with a three per cent limit for the buying club’s agent. Unsurprisingly, this has managed to unite Barnett, Raiola and Jorge Mendes, another of European football’s elite agencies, against what they view as a restraint of trade and a misunderstanding of their role in the game. They have promised to fight FIFA in the courts for as long as it takes.

And as Barnett regularly points out, his job is to make sure a fair share of football’s income goes to the stars of the show, something he has done better than most. It is also worth noting that Stellar rarely loses a client.

However, during a pandemic and with red tape on the horizon, the need to find new revenue streams is obvious, which brings us back to the real rationale for bringing such wide-ranging talents under one umbrella.

“There used to be walls between the disciplines in TV and film,” explains Chervin. “Sitcom writers only wrote sitcoms, showrunners who did drama, only did drama. If an actor wanted to produce something, it would be called a vanity deal, something done to placate them.

“But that all changed 10 years ago, the verticals started to break down and the top talent became multi-discipline. Now there are no limits to what a major celebrity can do.

“We have realised the value of influencers. The Kardashians, George Clooney, Ellen, John Cena, all have massive followings and they can break through the chatter.

“Athletes are no different. They have a massive opportunity to tell their interesting stories but also to tell the stories that interest them.”

Barnett might not know how to pitch a sports documentary to a US network or get a footballer a part in a Hollywood blockbuster but he now knows 500 people who do and he completely understands what this means for his clients.

“The world is their oyster and they’ll be able to pick and choose the opportunities that interest them,” he says.

“When players finish their careers today, they’re very wealthy, so we’re not talking about £250 to do an interview for Sky anymore. They’ll do things because they want to. Peter Crouch is one of ours and look at him. So yes, for the younger ones, they can become social media superstars. Gareth Bale has 100 million followers across all platforms.”

Owen Laverty is a director at Ear to the Ground, a London-based creative agency that specialises in sport and esports.

“Historically, we have always been influenced by athletes, musicians, actors and, more recently, celebrities,” says Laverty.

“But social media gave a gateway to a new wave of individuals to gain and monetise influence through direct access to large audiences for a low fee, the cost of creating good content. These content creators stole a march on athletes, musicians and actors in the way they built and engaged with youth audiences.

“What we’re seeing happen now is twofold. On one hand, we have footballers coming through who have grown up with social media and who have been following — and learning from — content creators themselves. So, they are interested and enthused by the idea of creating content and building audiences like ‘influencers’.

“And, on the other hand, talent agencies have finally learned from the content creators’ methods and are applying them to individuals with much more potential. No offence to YouTubers but a Champions League-winning player, who also creates fun stories and vlogs, is more likely to blow up online and open up massive commercial opportunities than a teenager starting out in their bedroom.

“This creates more commercial opportunities for players’ agents. Brands are going to pay more to sponsor individual talent who give them direct access to an audience.”

Laverty explains that in the past brands would have to pay for a footballer to appear in their advert, then film it and then buy the media spots, too. But now they can do deals with players who are already creating their own content and have huge audiences of their own.

This, he says, gives agents more opportunities to leverage cash on behalf of their clients, particularly as their content-creation skills are improving all the time.

“Lockdown seemed to have only accelerated all this,” he says. “With players at home, in similar situations to fans and not a lot to do, we saw a huge spike in more engaging, two-way content between players and their fans on social media. There was about a 15 per cent increase in Premier League player content on social. And fans loved it.

“More Q&A Instagram story sessions, more challenge and trick-shot content, more dancing. It filled a void but it was also successful and it seems many players are now taking these lessons forward.”

Laverty believes gaming will play a huge part in this, which seems a sensible bet. After all, Amazon Prime put all four of the Project Restart games it was given to stream on its gaming platform Twitch, as well. Those streams attracted 150,000 viewers.

But, as Chervin points out, the possibilities for the modern professional athlete are almost endless. One of the sport-related deals ICM Partners has done before buying Stellar was to help New Orleans Saints safety Malcolm Jenkins become a contributor for CNN on race and social justice issues.

Whether we can expect to see Stellar clients Mason Mount, Jordan Pickford or Nick Pope pop up as talking heads on heavyweight political shows is debatable but at least they now know it can be arranged.

Blues Forever · October 12, 2020

Some questionable nominees in the list. Since when Xavi, Suarez, Didi, Gerrard, Falcao, Bozsik, Gerson, Masopust, and Schuster are considered as a DMs??

Atomiswave · October 12, 2020

49 minutes ago, Blues Forever said:

Some questionable nominees in the list. Since when Xavi, Suarez, Didi, Gerrard, Falcao, Bozsik, Gerson, Masopust, and Schuster are considered as a DMs??

Dont mind these lists, most of them are horse shit.

Vesper · October 12, 2020

Costliest squads: Manchester City stands out

Issue number 308 of the Weekly Post presents the annual CIES Football Observatory analysis on the transfer fee expenditure to assemble the squad by big-5 league teams. As for 2019, Manchester City tops the table with an estimated 1.036 billion euro invested in transfer indemnities to sign their current players (including add-ons).

The figure recorded for Manchester City is €22M higher than that measured one year ago. While still inferior to that of their city rivals, the transfer expenditure to assemble the squad for Manchester United increased by €93M compared to October 2019: from €751 M to €844 M. With this increase, the Red Devils get closer to Paris St-Germain (€888 M, - €25 M) and overtake Real Madrid (€708M, - 194M). The biggest increase was recorded for Chelsea FC (€761M, +€198M).

Apart from Paris St-Germain and Real Madrid, only three other non-English teams are in the top 12: Barcelona (4th, €826M), Juventus (8th, €594M) and Atlético Madrid (11th, €483M). This finding confirms the financial supremacy of the Premier League. No team from this competition has invested less than €100 M in transfer indemnities to sign its current players. The European champions, Bayern Munich, only are 15th (€408M).

https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2020/wp308/en/