Athletic Article - When a Player wants to Leave (WARNING - LOTS OF WORDS )

‘Handing in a transfer request? That’s just embarrassing’ – how players really force their way out.

There are many ways to force a transfer but one golden rule has to be observed. “What you must never do is get an owner angry. Once a billionaire owner says, ‘He’s not for sale’, you are dead. Deal. Does. Not. Happen.”

The agent who is talking to The Athletic represents some of the biggest names in the game. “I don’t mind a manager or a CEO saying ‘not for sale’,” he adds, smiling. “But if an owner says it, you ain’t going nowhere because their own credibility is on the line and they don’t want to be embarrassed.”

Upsetting anybody else is seen as fair game. Part of the game, in fact. It’s how transfers — very few of which are straightforward — get done. “If you can’t find a solution, you do whatever is necessary to get out,” another agent adds. “‘I’m not playing’, tossing it off in training, bad body language, not putting the effort in. You never get a move by being nice.”

To illustrate his point, the same agent tells a story about a current England international who missed out on a transfer to Liverpool because “he wasn’t prepared to do the last bit” of their exit strategy.

The player told his manager and the chief executive he wanted to leave but when it came to saying that he wouldn’t go on the pre-season tour that summer, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He just wasn’t comfortable with taking things that far and, in the agent’s words, “f**ked it”.

It will certainly be fascinating to see how things play out with Harry Kane this summer, now that the wheels are starting to turn in a transfer story that is expected to gather pace over the coming weeks but could easily turn into a saga.

Kane has publicly admitted that the time has come for him to have a “conversation” with Tottenham Hotspur about his future, and everything points to the England striker informing the chairman Daniel Levy during those discussions that he has reached a point in his career where he wants to move on. “I don’t know, I mean he (Levy) might want to sell me,” Kane said in an interview with Gary Neville for SkyBet’s The Overlap. “He might be thinking, ‘If I could get £100 million for you, then why not?’ Do you know what I mean? I’m not going to be worth that for the next two or three years.”

That is likely to be wishful thinking on Kane’s part, bearing in mind that we are talking about Levy, who prides himself on being one of the toughest negotiators in the game. The big question in all of this is how far Kane and his representatives are willing to go — there are all sorts of levers that can be pulled — in order to ensure that they get the outcome they desire by the time the new season starts.
Some players will have no qualms about rocking the boat. Robbie Savage played just about every trick in the book when he wanted to leave Birmingham City for Blackburn Rovers in January 2005. He lied to Steve Bruce about aspects of his private life, turned on the tears when the two of them were talking in the manager’s office and, in what ended up being the Welshman’s last game for the club, went through the motions. “I went out that day (against Newcastle United) and I deliberately played badly. I looked like I couldn’t care less, and it was the first and the last time I’ve done that,” Savage writes in his autobiography. “I’d been on fire but I let everyone down: the fans, the other players and Steve Bruce. He knew that I was playing to get away and that he had a problem. I needed to force the issue.”

Savage left no stone unturned. He even contacted a friend at Sky TV and asked him to get someone to film him at the training ground when the other players were on a day off so that it looked as though he had been ordered to come in on his own. The story wasn’t true but it ended up on the breaking news ticker and that meant Savage had succeeded in generating the publicity that he wanted.

Eventually, with everyone worn down by the whole saga and Savage banished to the reserves, Blackburn and Birmingham agreed a deal. Savage had made it virtually impossible for Birmingham to keep him.
“I got what I wanted in the end,” Savage tells The Athletic. “And I honestly believe that if I didn’t act the way I did, although I regret it now, I wouldn’t have got the move in that window and I’d have missed out on the chance of playing for Mark Hughes.”

David Sullivan was Birmingham’s co-owner at the time and has dealt with a couple of similar cases to Savage since taking over at West Ham United, where Dimitri Payet and Marko Arnautovic caused no end of problems before they were eventually sold. Payet essentially went on strike, despite the fact he had recently signed a five-and-a-half-year deal. Sullivan wanted to “make an example” of Payet and keep him at the club against his will but that approach would not have helped the manager or the rest of the squad — and players know this as soon as they start being disruptive.

Managers, Sullivan says, want difficult players out of the club as soon as possible because they “create a terrible atmosphere”. In a way, listening to a manager explain what it is like trying to deal with the fallout from a player being denied the big transfer he wanted helps to explain why those who choose to force through a deal more often than not end up getting their way.

In this scenario, the player in question, who is now making quite a name for himself in the Premier League, reported back for pre-season training, walked into the manager’s office and politely but matter-of-factly laid it on the line.
“He was really honest with me,” says the manager, who has worked in the Premier League and the Championship. “He said, ‘Look, Gaffer, it’s nothing to do with you but I want to leave. I see myself in the Premier League, the agent says he’s got this, this, this, and I want to go.’ So, quite rightly, the club says, ‘For you to go, a club has got to pay X amount.’

“But clubs weren’t willing to pay that and then as a manager you’ve got a player on your hands who just doesn’t want to be there. So for the next two, three months you get sulking. You think, ‘How can I put him on the pitch?’
“If you keep players against their wishes, they down tools.
The only time I had anything any good out of that player was the November, when he’d stopped sulking. And by the time the end of that month came he was thinking about moving in January, so you’re back to the same thing.
“With a player like that — someone who is an important player — from the moment they say that they want to leave, we’re f**ked as managers. They’re not going to give you commitment and they can be a bad influence in the changing room. “My reaction is, ‘If that’s the way you’re going to be, I don’t want you around the squad and you can go to the under-23s.’ But then you’ll have the club push back on you and say, ‘He’s an asset, he needs to be involved or his value will go down.’ And then you say, ‘But he doesn’t give a s**t.’ So you end up having friction with the club. So that whole situation is an absolute nightmare for a manager.”

Failing to report for training, or refusing to play in matches, is a fairly standard approach for a footballer to take when trying to engineer a way out of a club. Others will turn up for work but invent injuries — back trouble, which is difficult to pick up on a scan, is a favourite.

Some will be a much bigger pain in the backside. One agent tells a story about a Tottenham Hotspur player going out to training and kicking balls everywhere. Then there is the midfielder who gave his club’s technical director a mouthful of abuse that, realistically, few people would get away with in any other industry.

Whatever the exit strategy, agents will be constantly in their client’s ear encouraging them to be difficult, and so will the club that is trying to sign the player.
In truth, there is not an awful lot the selling club can do in those circumstances. Any player conducting themselves in a way that breaches their contract can be fined up to a maximum of two weeks’ wages but that is no deterrent when there is a lot more money to be made by signing elsewhere.

There is something else to consider in all of this and in many ways it separates the good agents from the bad ones, bearing in mind that a player is going out on a limb when he starts being disruptive. “The art is to know whether these deals can actually happen or not,” one agent says. “Don’t get a player’s hopes too high, because then they are absolutely killed afterwards.”

Either way, rattling cages shouldn’t be the default setting for negotiating. “Some agents try and force things through that are just ridiculous. And all that happens is that it causes a load of bad feeling and nobody wins,” says one leading agent. “There has to be some working together and I think you can get the deal done without being a bastard.
“Try and find a solution for everybody. It could be, ‘We ain’t going to let you go, but we’ll give you £15,000 a week more and we’ll put a buy-out in your contract for the summer.’ And you’re like, ‘OK, we’ll stay.’ So instead of upsetting everybody, you might get a win by playing it out sometimes.”

The nightmare scenario for a player who has his heart set on leaving is if someone at the buying club has a late change of heart. That is what happened in 2013 when Yohan Cabaye, who was pushing to join Arsenal, went on strike at Newcastle. At the time, it was reported the transfer didn’t go through because Arsenal failed to meet Newcastle’s valuation. However, it is understood that a deal between the two clubs was pretty much agreed, only for it to collapse after Arsene Wenger changed his mind at the last moment. Cabaye was left to pick up the pieces.
Gylfi Sigurdsson had more success after he didn’t turn up for a pre-season flight to the United States when Everton were trying to sign him from Swansea City in 2017. A month of protracted negotiations later, Sigurdsson completed his move to Goodison Park.

Some were surprised Sigurdsson, who always had a reputation for being a model professional, chose to go down the path that he did, yet that kind of thinking overlooks a fundamental point that is at the heart of this whole subject. “Gylfi’s a lovely bloke,” says someone who was working on behalf of one of the clubs in that £40 million deal. “But number one is that it’s their career and they’re going to look after themselves.”

William Gallas was clearly thinking along those lines in 2006. Indeed, it is hard to think of many examples of high-profile players who decided to take things quite as far as he did when he left Chelsea.
The Frenchman was so determined to get out that he threatened to score an own goal or get sent off. Or at least that was the accusation Chelsea made in an extraordinary statement released after Gallas moved to Arsenal.

“He initially refused to play against Liverpool in the FA Cup semi-final last season in an effort to force an increased contract offer,” the statement read. “As is now well documented, he refused to join up with the team in Los Angeles during pre-season, despite agreeing the dates for his return, as the other World Cup players did, with the club.
“Before the first game of the season against Manchester City, when only four defenders were available and John Terry was doubtful with an injury, he refused to play. He went on to threaten that if he was forced to play, or if he was disciplined and financially punished for his breach of the rules, that he could score an own goal or get himself sent off, or make deliberate mistakes.”
Gallas later denied he had ever said he would score own goals for Chelsea’s opponents but admitted that he was firm in expressing his desire to leave.

The media can be a useful tool for clubs and agents when it comes to trying to get a transfer moving, whether it’s drip-feeding a few snippets of off-the-record information that are designed to unsettle things, encouraging a player to say a few lines post-match or going the whole hog and setting up a one-to-one interview. Players will commonly say something more controversial while away on international duty when there is no club media officer near them — Moussa Sissoko perfected the art while at Newcastle — and often claim afterwards that everything was somehow mixed up in translation. Of course it was.
At other times, the process is a lot more transparent.
In 2008, Gareth Barry gave an unauthorised interview to the News of the World, the former Sunday tabloid, saying he wanted to leave Aston Villa for Liverpool and criticising Martin O’Neill, who was his manager at the time.
It turned out to be a bad error of judgement. Barry was fined two weeks’ wages, ordered to stay away from Villa’s training ground for a fortnight, never joined Liverpool and ended up playing for the Midlands club for another season. “You should always keep what goes on to try and get out behind closed doors,” says one agent.
Aidy Ward saw things rather differently when it came to Raheem Sterling’s departure from Liverpool, which was played out in public. Sterling gave a 27-minute interview to the BBC in April 2015 — an interview Liverpool had no idea was taking place — saying he was flattered by interest from Arsenal and dismayed to be portrayed as a mercenary. That was followed by Ward saying his client would not be staying at Anfield even if he was offered £900,000 a week. He effectively went to war with Liverpool over Sterling.
Although Brendan Rodgers, Liverpool’s manager at the time, described Sterling’s PR gamble as a “mistake”, and the whole saga generated a lot of negative publicity around those involved, the bottom line is that the player got the move he wanted. “Aidy Ward will turn around and go, ‘I got the job done,’” one agent says, almost admiringly, before adding, “But I believe what he did is a last resort.”
Social media offers another platform for players to get their message across these days and has made for some entertaining exchanges over time, whether that be Saido Berahino telling West Brom chairman Jeremy Peace that he would never play for the club again, or Darren Bent daring to take on Levy.
“Seriously getting pissed off now,” Bent tweeted in July 2009. “Why can’t anything be simple. It’s so frustrating hanging round doing jack s**t. Do I wanna go Hull City NO. Do I wanna go stoke NO do I wanna go sunderland YES so stop f**king around, Levy. Sunderland are not the problem in the slightest.” Bent was on Wearside a week later, which represents something of a triumph on his part given that he was taking on Levy.

In fact, another story about Levy highlights why for many agents, and players, this whole subject of forcing a move has to be seen as a two-way street. Peter Crouch, who is one of the most likeable people in the game, was in his second spell at Tottenham and had no plans to leave the club until he walked into manager Harry Redknapp’s office on deadline day in August 2011 — and straight into a conference call with Levy.
Crouch, who had two years left on his contract and scored seven goals for Spurs in the Champions League the previous season, was told in no uncertain terms that he was leaving White Hart Lane. The alternative, Levy explained, was staying at Tottenham and not kicking a ball for the club again.
“It’s not just the players and the agents. If a club wants a player out, they’re quite happy to treat him like a piece of s**t,” one agent explains. “‘We’ll get you training at 5 o’clock when all the lads have gone home.’ That happens. Regularly. ‘Pick up your stuff, get yourself into the under-23s dressing room and you ain’t coming back. Fuck you. Find yourself a new club.’”

If you wondered why any mention of putting in a transfer request has been left to last, it is for good reason. “That’s just embarrassing,” says an agent. “What is it? You’re handing in a letter saying you want to leave. What the hell does that do? ‘I’m handing in a transfer request’. ‘Oh. Good for you.’”

In fact, it transpires somewhat ironically that the transfer request is usually submitted these days to help the selling club. “They ask you to put one in after the deal is agreed, so they can say the player asked to leave,” another agent explains. “You have to give that as part of your negotiation ploy to get out because the chairman always says, ‘The fans are going to kill us.’”

A former Premier League chairman confirms that is indeed the case. “It takes the heat off the owners,” he adds. “That’s the only reason to do a transfer request in this day and age, so it convinces the supporters that the player doesn’t want to be there and that the club aren’t willing sellers.”

In theory, a player submitting a transfer request forfeits any future signing-on fees that are due, or loyalty payments as they are now more commonly known, although even that is rarely enforced by the sound of things. “I can assure you there’s not many agents who would allow that these days,” the former chairman adds. “If a player has been signed for not a lot and is transferred for a big fee, they’ll turn around and say, ‘We’ve made you enough money.’”

Ultimately, it is hard to escape the feeling that almost everything is loaded in the favour of the player who wants to get away. Yet before anybody starts feeling too sorry for the selling club, it is worth remembering that they’ll be trying to make a transfer work for them in exactly the same way when it comes to signing a replacement.
As one agent puts it rather succinctly, “The whole thing is a game.”

Posted By: The Gaffer on June 6th 2021 at 11:14:58

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