Why Should Footballers Show Loyalty?

Whenever a player decides to leave a club for a higher pay deal at another club, fans always label them a ‘greedy, money-grabber’, who should have shown more loyalty to his current club. The latest big transfer of Fernando Torres from Liverpool to Chelsea is a prime example.


At Liverpool, it is believed that Fernando Torres was earning in the region of £110k per week. A large sum of money, but now he has made the move down south to Chelsea, he has increased that dramatically to an enormous £175k per week.

The response of former Liverpool striker John Aldridge today sums up the often-taken view of many people.

“Torres is simply a mercenary who has gone for a huge pay rise. Liverpool fans stuck by him this season. They made excuses for his poor performances, about his injuries still affecting him. But all the time Torres appeared to be taking the club and the fans for a ride.

“Once he had put in a transfer request Liverpool were right to let him go. There's no point keeping someone who doesn't want to be there. Maybe Liverpool are better off without him.”

The first point to make is that he then goes on to praise Andy Carroll and says that he is the right type of player for Liverpool and could give a lot more than Torres did. However, surely the same argument could be made about Andy Carroll as he made for Torres.

Carroll has said in the past that he is happy at Newcastle, but when it came to it, he was happy to make the move to Liverpool where he has over doubled his wages. He put in a transfer request when push came to shove. Yet, Torres is a mercenary whereas Carroll is progressing his career.

In his entire career at club level, Fernando Torres has only ever won one trophy – the Spanish Segunda Division back in 2001/02. For a player of his calibre, it is a fair desire to want to challenge for trophies and only the most deluded of Liverpool fans will claim that he would be more likely to win trophies had he stayed.


Even ignoring the ambition part of it, why should a player show loyalty to their club? Unless they have an actual link to the club, then at the heart of it, the club is merely an employer.

Why should Fernando Torres show any loyalty to Liverpool FC? A career in football is fairly short in the big scheme of things, so you have to make the most of it while you can.

If a high-flying lawyer was offered the chance to double his salary by switching to a rival company, he would and nobody would even think that he should have shown loyalty to his previous employer. So why exactly should a footballer be any different?

Loyalty also works two ways. It is difficult to argue that players should show loyalty to a club when the clubs so often show no loyalty toward the players. Liverpool showed little loyalty to the likes of Paul Konchesky, Albert Riera, Ryan Babel or Alberto Aquilani in recent months, shifting them onto other clubs because they weren’t in the club’s plans anymore.

If the club will show so little loyalty to players, then it is difficult to argue that the players should show any great loyalty in return. You are required to be loyal to your club, but only if you are able. They will certainly not be loyal to you when you are not able.

It is interesting to hear this from the wife of former Cameroon international footballer, Lucien Mettomo. She described how she had been shipped out to a dozen cities over a few years with no control over where she lives or how long she will live there.


People look at the likes of Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard as being role models for being one-club men throughout their careers. Further afield, we see the likes of Paolo Maldini at AC Milan, Iker Casillas at Real Madrid and Francesco Totti at Roma. All players who have spent their whole career at the same club.

These players have a close affinity with the clubs, having come through their academies, and in most cases, being supporters of the club since they were young. However, there is also a common theme amongst those players. They are all playing at the top clubs in the world.

Do people seriously think that if Paul Scholes had been at his home-town club, Oldham, he would have shown the same loyalty? Of course he wouldn’t. He is a top player and wants to win trophies and succeed. To do this, you need to play for the top clubs.

For a top quality player, the only time they will show loyalty is if they have an affinity with the club and are already at a top club. But then, can we really call it loyalty? Could they really find a better deal and be more likely to win trophies elsewhere? Or are they just already at the peak of their chosen profession?


In the end, fans have a great loyalty to their own club. They automatically assume that the players at the club should show the same loyalty. But offer almost any of those fans the opportunity to switch jobs in exchange for doubling their salary and I can guarantee that 99.9% of them would jump at the chance.

For professional footballers, football is their job and the club is their employer. There is no more loyalty from them than from any other professional to their employer. So we should not expect them to show any great loyalty to their club.

Could Fernando Torres and Andy Carroll mark the end of the bubble in football and can Chelsea now satisfy UEFA's new regulations?

In one incredible day, three Premiership clubs turned what had been a relatively quiet transfer window on its head. With over £130m spent on new players in the space of around two hours between 9pm and 11pm, it delivered a hammer blow to the argument that an era of austerity and financial management was beginning to edge into football in England.

With the upcoming implementation of the new UEFA Financial Fair Play regulations at the beginning of the 2011/12 season, it was believed that clubs were beginning to prepare for them by curbing their spending and cutting large earners from their wage bill. Instead, it seems to have served to create the most incredible and volatile transfer window in history.


The deal to bring Fernando Torres to Chelsea from Liverpool was in the region of £50m and makes him one of the most expensive footballers in history. Whether or not it can be argued that there is some value in that deal, it is an incredible amount of money. If we add in the signing of David Luiz from Benfica, Chelsea splashed out almost £75m in the space of about 30 minutes late on Monday night. All this came only hours after the club announced losses of £70.9m for the previous season.

And if the Torres deal seemed overly extravagant, the £35m deal to bring Andy Carroll to Liverpool from Newcastle is surely the most overpriced transfer in history. He cost well over twice what Newcastle paid to sign Alan Shearer fifteen years ago. Almost £10m more than Wayne Rooney cost. You could have signed arguably the best striker on the planet – David Villa – and had a couple of million left over.

It is crazy that the British record transfer is for a player with only 80 senior matches under his belt and with only one international appearance to his name. Indeed, he cost more millions than he has scored goals in his entire career since making his senior debut five years ago.


However, Liverpool are hardly a club to worry about in this situation. Despite spending over £58m on new strikers in one day, when you factor in the sales of Fernando Torres and Ryan Babel, they have a net spend of only £1m. Whilst the fees that they have been paying are over-inflated and simply obscene, financially they have spent almost nothing.

Chelsea are the club that are under most scrutiny today. £75m spent despite announcing huge losses seems almost unthinkable to the average person. Chairman Bruce Buck announced recently that the club were on course to meet the regulations once they are implemented.

The club slashed the wage bill by around £20m in the summer by selling and releasing the likes of Deco, Joe Cole, Ricardo Carvalho, Michael Ballack and Juliano Belletti, but given that Fernando Torres is on a reported £175k per week, that increases the wage bill by over £9m per year.


We can assume that David Luiz must be on fairly decent wages. If we conservatively assume that he is on around £60k per week, which is likely to be on the low side given that he is a Brazilian international signed for over £20m, we can add another £3m to the total.

That means that the two new signings have increased the wage bill by a minimum of £13m. If we include the wages from their only summer signing, Ramires, who is earning a reported £4m per year, this takes it to £17m. In other words, they have almost completely cancelled out the savings they made in the summer.

So, where is the savings likely to come from? Under the new regulations, injections of money from owners will be limited to €15m per year (around £12.8m). So we can write off that much from the deficit, making it a far more manageable £58.1m to cover.


Success naturally leads to more money – it is a general rule of not only football, but business in general. However, last season Chelsea won the double. So realistically, no further domestic success would be possible, and to budget on achieving that feat every year would be highly unrealistic.

They only reached the last 16 of the Champions League, which would have led to a large fall in revenue, given that they have become accustomed to reaching the semi-finals at least in recent seasons. The loss of two home games, plus the additional revenue that comes from success in this competition would potential help to cancel out some of the losses, but relying on continued success in this competition is a risky proposition.

Finishing in the top four of the Premiership is an absolute minimum for Chelsea to even think about meeting these new regulations. Without the Champions League and the money that comes with it, Chelsea would be in severe problems.

However, another problem they will now face is how the new regulations deal with player transfers. Chelsea cannot simply write off the spending from this transfer window as a simple lump sum payment now. Rather, they must amortise the fee over the course of the player’s contract.

Therefore, given that both Fernando Torres and David Luiz have signed five year contracts, the transfer fee would be split evenly over the period of the contract. In other words, they must mark down a cost of £15m per year for the next five years for these transfers.


This adds another £15m each year that Chelsea must try and cover in order to break even and fulfil UEFA’s new regulations.

Chelsea are hoping that they have cut the deficit by recent changes, including having increased ticket prices by over 10% over the summer, reduced bonus payments for the players, a new deal with Adidas that will increase sponsorship payments from around £10m per season to around £20m per season, and increased income from TV revenue.

However, the bright point for Chelsea is the question of whether UEFA will actually stringently enforce the regulations. Currently, the likes of Chelsea, Real Madrid, Liverpool and Barcelona would all fail under the regulations. Would UEFA really ban them from European competition? Would they have a Champions League without a number of the biggest names?


Even if they do enforce it, there are a number of caveats built in. For the 2011/12 and 2012/13 seasons combined, clubs can overspend by €45m so long as it is covered by an injection of equity from the club’s owner. For the next three year period, they can overspend by another combined €45m, then €30m for the next three years, then €15m, and only then must clubs actually break even.

In other words, clubs do not actually have to break even for another 14 years. They can continue to make losses, albeit steadily reducing losses all the way until 2025. And to add to this, if clubs can show that they are heading in the right direction and moving toward breaking even, UEFA would reduce the sanctions.

As far as I can tell, that is a major get-out-of-jail card. For example, if Manchester City replicate last year’s losses of £121m in the first year of the new regulations, but cut this to a mere £110m in the second year, they could avoid being banned from Europe because they have cut their losses and are moving in the right direction. No matter that they have lost a nine-figure amount – they are trying hard.


The new regulations are a good thing in so far as they look to curb the spending in football which have risen to even more unbelievable levels in an incredible couple of hours on deadline day. However, there are other problems with them that will be explored at a later date.

Chelsea face a major battle to meet these regulations and their long-term plan of breaking even by 2010 has clearly failed spectacularly. Whether they can continue to look to cut their costs without sacrificing success on the field is unknown, but they have to try to fulfil the new requirements or risk the wrath of UEFA and Michel Platini.

Again, whether he would follow through with his threats remains to be seen, but can the likes of Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City take that risk. Surely not, which means that the 31st January 2011 could be marked down as the final peak in the ridiculous bubble that has been seen in football over the past decade.