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The ‘Potential’ Factor

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It’s natural for transfer fees to increase as the year’s progress. Why not? Everything else does. But over the last five or six seasons the price of ‘buying’ a footballer has increased out of all proportion. It now appears to be snowballing at a rate that surely, no business can realistically sustain from a financial viewpoint.

One of the main factors which contribute to this appears to be the ‘potential’ factor. Gone are the days when clubs would bring in players who have a proven ability to perform on any given football stage and at any given level. Now, clubs are investing in ‘unproven’ younger players…players who are considered to have the ‘potential’ to attain the required level of performance at some time in the future. And they are paying vast amounts of money to get them. That, in terms of sound business investment, appears to be an extremely risky strategy.

The unfortunate (or possibly fortunate) aspect of this is that there are very few clubs with the financial capacity to adopt such a strategy. Whilst this situation remains, the gap between extremely affluent and less affluent clubs will continue to widen with, probably, an adverse effect on the competitive nature of the various leagues.

It begs several questions.

Will the minority of ‘money’ clubs endeavour to monopolise most of the young talent in the future?

How long can transfer fees increase before the whole system goes pear-shaped?

What can football administrators do to create more equality among clubs and therefore improve the scope for wider and fairer competition between all clubs?

Are administrators motivated to achieve greater club equality or are they afraid to wage war with the ‘money’ clubs due to financial greed?

It seems like a growing problem to me. What do you think?

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