Yes we were either charged a fee for him or he was free. Nothing to depreciate and charge if he was free (other than his pay of course) but we were charged weren’t we, so yes there’s a depreciation charge as the fee is written off. Sorry wasn’t looking to start an argument and I should have read back through the preceding posts.
So Anthony Gordon and/or Harry Winks have been linked as being involved in Spurs/Everton’s deal for Richarlison. I wonder if that could depress the sell-on we receive for Richarlison and if so, what we can do to challenge it. It’s an interesting issue. Anyone have any insight?
Assets have value so I suspect they'll need to include the fair market value of players received into the calculation and pay based on that. If that wasn't the case, clubs could pay for transfers in any number of ways not involving cash and then the receiving club could claim no money was received, which is clearly nonsense.
Pretty sure @Arakel is right. Ultimately everything is disclosed to the authorities anyway and I doubt they'd accept a deal that says Richarlison is worth £1 + Harry Winks (for example).
For what it’s worth I asked Kieran Maguire as a question for his pod and he just replied that “player swaps are used as a way of circumventing sell on fees.” I suppose it is a question of degree. Everton would not be able to say that Richarlison is worthless but they might be able to say he is only worth £25m (as opposed to 2-3x that) given he has two years left on his contract and they are desperate from an FFP perspective and still get away with that.
If that is going on then regularly I can only assume it hasn't been challenged in court. The effective argument of the receiving club would need to be that the received player was worth 0, which doesn't pass any kind of smell test.
Well, no, it can't. That's the entire point of fair market value: the value falls within a reasonable range. EDIT: and for clarity, this isn't a point unique to football. A requirement for fair market value/arms length dealings apply in a number of areas, so the courts are well versed in considering them when needed.
Sure but saying Richarlison is worth £35m not £60m is a much more plausible argument than saying that Richarlison is worth 0 not £60m. Duxbury said re the Udinese swaps that the Italian authorities which are a little stricter than ours had no issues with the valuations of Pussetto (£7m - too high), Deulofeu (£12m too low even if injured) and Pereyra (£13m - too high). But given the reported structure of our sell (10% of fee if over £40m) - the difference of £6m between a sale at £60m and a sale at £35m creates a good litigation incentive and it would be interesting to see it reach court.
If Richarlison goes for 35m with no players coming the other way, he is worth 35m on the market (assuming that's the most they could get). If he commands 35m plus a player coming the other way, the value is 35m plus the value of the player. You have to look at the whole, not individual pieces in isolation. Change Winks to a pile of gold bars, or real estate, or a Van Gogh painting. It's all the same, really. They all have value, and so does he (probably at least 15m).
I know what "fair market value" is. I'm an FD. Very easy commodities not so easy with unique footballers. Any would have a wide range and Everton and spurs just pick the extremes of those ranges. What is Sarr worth ? £30m, £20m, £15m ? What is Dennis worth ? Presume you can just give me the fair market value of those two now just to prove your point ? With players excahnges there is no "actual price" to compare to. Winks hasn't just been sold, nor has Gordon so what are their "fair values" ?
No I appreciate that. But player swaps are not generally if ever governed by the same agreement as trading Winks for a Van Gogh painting would be. Winks is not the consideration highlighting in the Richarlison purchase and sale contract. He is the asset being purchase for some lesser amount in a separate contract. The two clubs might negotiate for the two players alongside one another but will paper their transfers separately. Let’s say Spurs value Winks and £29m and Everton value Richarlison at £60m. Meanin that if governed by one contract, Spurs would pay £31m + Winks for Richarlison. But instead Spurs and Everton agree to reduce the fees for players by, say, £21m. So Winks goes to Everton for £8m and Richarlison goes to Spurs for £39m - what then? Watford have to prove to some auditor that there’s no way Harry Winks is worth just £8m? Or that Richarlison was absolutely worth £65m to Everton? What’s the standard of review there?
You compare them to similar players with roughly equivalent profiles sold on the market and establish a reasonable range. It's not absolutely objective, but nothing about playing trading is. My valuations of individual players wouldn't be particularly informative, since I am not in the business of buying and selling players. Those who do, however, would be capable of offering a realistic ballpark valuation, even without factoring in historical fees or similar profile players moving in the same window.
The point is all players are unique and valuations are subjective. If Everton and Spurs play around with the valuations as noted above and pick valuations that suit them, no one will challenge unless they are utterly ridiculous.
That's not set up as a player swap, those are two separate deals you're talking about. In that kind of situation the fee for one player (or possibly/probably both) would likely end up looking very suspicious and would be easy to justify versus equivalent sales made of similar profile players, as mentioned in my above post to TuT. The case there would be to calculate a reasonable market expectation for the value of Richarlison, then for Winks, and then look at how wide the delta is between expectation and reality. The potential scale there goes from reasonable doubt to blatant.
The fact that they are all unique doesn't mean valuations can't fall well outside of reasonable ranges/average market expectations. There's a certain low end fee you'd expect to see someone of Wink's profile to command, for example. No one is saying it has to be bang on what a club would bid, or the high end, but it's pretty obvious there's a floor to the expected valuation somewhere and it's not zero.
Well all player ‘swaps’ are structured that way. They are negotiated alongside one another and then papered separately. Which equivalent sale could we point to to say “hey, objectively, Richarlison is a £65m player!” Especially with 2 years left and Everton having an FFP deadline of June 30 (Thursday).
Have a read of these two articles if you really want to go down the legal rabbit hole of sell-on clauses: https://bmdw.nl/wp-content/uploads/...Players-jurisprudence-Football-Legal-2019.pdf https://bmdw.nl/wp-content/uploads/...FIFA-and-CAS-jurisprudence-Football-Legal.pdf Page 6 of the 2nd PDF talks a bit about the approach to player exchanges but in the absence of any CAS or FIFA cases it’s essentially educated guesswork. We all know Gino would never dream of suing someone at CAS, so I guess we’ll never know even if Everton do shaft us.
If we're lucky, soon enough we could direct our greasy mitts towards Raphinha, from the valuations I'm hearing on him...
No one is saying it could be zero, just that there is a wide range and the clubs are free to pick a non stupid value at the bottom of that range to meet their needs.
I’m a lawyer, so like legal rabbit holes (sometimes) and totally will read those articles (though not right now when I am servicing my demanding clients). Typically the fact that Everton want Dennis would constrain their capacity to screw us over but then again we’re desperate to cash in so I don’t think we’ll be able to suddenly hike the price out of spite.
We're due some sell-on karma given Walsall were due 15% of any Deeney fee and we gave him away for free
Agreed. Completely. So fair market value for someone like Winks could be say £6m-£25m ?? Which value would you pick if you were Everton ?
My imagination to prove a point. There is a huge range as can be seen with our debates about Sarr. Do you think the premier league will set the value ? The clubs will set a value at the very bottom of any theoretical range and nothing anyone can do about it. There’s no formula and the 2 clubs will have agreed the value it’s not like an arbitration panel.
