Serie A’s summer of savings: How Italian clubs have steered clear of transfer fees
In the garden of the Grand Hotel Rimini, sporting directors came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. For the third year in a row, Italy’s transfer window opened on the same stretch of Adriatic coastline, where the most celebrated regista (director) of them all, Andrea Pirlo Federico Fellini, was born.
Disappointingly for the film buffs waiting tables, any discussion about 8½ was limited to the loan fee that Inter Milan have agreed to pay Chelsea for Romelu Lukaku. Amid the clinking glasses, general managers like Roma’s Tiago Pinto defended their profession from comparisons with Fellini’s Vitelloni, the layabouts and slackers in a dead-end town that could be Serie A. “I’m right in thinking the window only opened yesterday, aren’t I?” he smiled while introducing the club’s new back-up goalkeeper Mile Svilar to the media.
Svilar was out of contract at Benfica and isn’t alone in moving to Serie A on a Bosman. The next player Pinto unveiled on Monday was Nemanja Matic, a curious twist of fate if you recall that Manchester United-Benfica game at Old Trafford five years ago when his shot hit the post, ricocheted off Svilar’s back and went in.
Jose Mourinho was the home side’s manager at the time and the remnants of the last United team to win a trophy are spread throughout the league. Matic replaces Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who turned down the new contract Roma were offering to follow the footsteps of his old captain Edin Dzeko in moving to Inter, where “Mkhi” becomes the first Armenian ever to play for the club — unless, of course, you count France international Youri Djorkaeff.
Activity has not been lacking, then. A lot of the yellow-ticker, we-interrupt-this-programme business has come in Serie A this summer with Lukaku returning to Inter for next to nothing and Paul Pogba set to do the same with Juventus, at least in fees, after leaving for a combined €225 million.
While it is undoubtedly a coup to bring the league’s former MVP back to San Siro just a year after he left and the deja vu is palpable in seeing a World Cup winner return on a free transfer a decade on from the last one that enabled him to move to Turin, it would be wrong to categorise either as a low-cost operation. Lukaku’s lawyer Sebastien Ladure insists he doesn’t understand where reports of his client taking a wage cut come from and that “Big Rom” is now the highest-paid player in Serie A.
Inter are paying around €25 million between loan fee and salary knowing “all” they’ll get in return are goals as Lukaku remains under Chelsea’s control, with no option to buy included in the deal. As for Pogba, the Frenchman is expected to sign for approximately the same pay packet as the one Paulo Dybala requested, despite missing more game time at United (80 games!) than his former team-mate and good friend did these past three years at Juventus.
Minestra riscaldata (reheated soup) is being served. The taste test in Italian football tends to show it’s never as good as the first time. Rather than send it back to the kitchen, the hope is that second helpings will still be nutritious enough to make Inter and Juventus stronger. Encouragement comes, of course, from Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who may not have been quite as fresh as he was in 2011 but still contributed to Milan winning the league 11 years after his first Scudetto with the club.
While the Swede recovers from the ACL repair he needed after six months of training and occasionally playing without one, Milan found another free agent in Divock Origi to compete with the team’s other forwards and deliver some of the big goals that made him such a cult hero at Liverpool.
A cutting edge was lacking at times last season, which is why Milan chose to reserve a big chunk of their transfer budget for a right winger/No 10 like Charles De Ketelaere rather than invest it in Lille’s Sven Botman, who joined Newcastle United instead. A cast-iron defence is what won Milan the league rather than an attack that ranked as only the fourth-most prolific in Serie A.
Cousins Inter scored 15 more goals than them — not that it mattered in the end as the failure of back-up goalkeeper Ionut Radu to keep one out in Bologna swung the Scudetto away from the holders. Failing to provide captain Samir Handanovic with adequate cover cost Inter even under Simone Inzaghi’s predecessor Antonio Conte, who must have been frustrated to watch his team literally drop points when the veteran Daniele Padelli deputised for the Slovenian.
It’s a position Inter needed to fill more than the centre-forward role, where they encountered few problems in moving on from Lukaku. The out-of-contract Ajax goalkeeper Andre Onana steps into the breach and at 26, will succeed, in the not-too-distant future, the soon-to-be-38-year-old Handanovic.
Pre-season began on Monday and as much as coaches would have liked all their most wanted recruits to already be signed, sealed and delivered, the transfer market, as Pinto points out, still has almost two months to run. Perhaps it will only truly take off if Roma sell Nicolo Zaniolo, Inter and Paris Saint-Germain agree a price for Milan Skriniar, and Chelsea meet Juventus’s conditions for the purchase of Matthijs de Ligt.
The biggest deal done so far for cash, excluding the options to make existing loans permanent, is the €12 million Sassuolo are spending on 21-year-old Uruguay international Agustin Alvarez, presumably under the assumption that Gianluca Scamacca is on his way.
Frugality is everywhere — that is, with the exception of Monza, who are about to make their Serie A debut and won’t limit themselves to classing survival as a successful season. Silvio Berlusconi and Adriano Galliani want European football, and are showing ambition by going after Mauro Icardi who, lest we forget, makes €12 million a year at PSG.
The rest of the league is keeping what powder there is as dry as possible.
It’s a reminder of the enduring impact of the pandemic on continental European football. Juventus have recapitalised the club twice in the past three years to the tune of around €700 million; a huge amount considering their market cap is €892 million. Chief executive Maurizio Arrivabene told Tuttosport last week: “You don’t resolve a crisis by waving a magic wand from one day to the next. The June 2022 accounts will still be blood and tears.”
Inter lost a record €245.6 million last year and needed emergency finance from Oaktree Capital Management. Roma were €185.3 million in the red and The Friedkin Group has already invested more than half a billion. Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis claims the club is €220 million down on where it otherwise should be after missing out on the Champions League for a couple of years and acting as if the pandemic would soon blow over by making Victor Osimhen the most expensive player in their history a few months into a global health crisis. The squeeze is changing the landscape of Serie A.
Four top-flight clubs switched hands last season. Another handful are up for sale. The league is fighting the exact parameters of a cost-control mechanism called the liquidity index and teams preparing for Europe are wary of sanctions by UEFA, even if Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations are to be applied with a lighter touch when taking the pandemic into account.
At a time when the Premier League was able to roll over its existing domestic TV deals and grow the pie even more on an international level by signing a six-year contract in the US alone worth €2.3 billion, Serie A recorded a drop in local rights and is only now ending two years without any exposure at all in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa).
On the bright side, Serie A will soon be able to sell its international rights for longer after an amendment to the Melandri Law. Why does that matter? Fans in other markets no longer get lost in the shuffle as the league changes channels every three years. Broadcasters aren’t having to think about renewal costs after 18 months. Instead, they can keep growing an audience and creating value. As the rights become more lucrative, the money flowing back into the league should become greater and more resources will be available to be ploughed back into teams and, hopefully, infrastructure.
Until then, the transfer market will look like it does today with Napoli letting Lorenzo Insigne and Dries Mertens run their contracts down, Inter weighing up whether they can do Dybala on a free, Juventus figuring that a 34-year-old Angel Di Maria on a Bosman is a short-term fix for a team determined to be champions again, and Lazio hoping Alessio Romagnoli chooses the club he supported as a boy over a newly-promoted Premier League club Fulham, who can offer him higher wages.
By the same token, Milan know, as was the case with Newcastle and Botman, that Leeds United — a team that narrowly escaped Premier League relegation last year — can out-bid them for De Ketelaere should they wish to sign the Belgium international from Club Brugge. All Milan can do is accentuate the appeal of playing for a seven-time Champions League winner at a stadium as iconic as San Siro on a Scudetto-winning team because, were it to come down to purchasing power alone, there’s no contest with the Super Premier League and its constituents.
This is the reality. Of course, it didn’t make Serie A any less compelling last season. The league didn’t miss Cristiano Ronaldo, Gigio Donnarumma or Lukaku. It still went down to the final day. Fiorentina got into Europe, Roma won a trophy and Salernitana pulled off a great escape. Another fine season awaits us. And yet, the Grand Hotel Rimini does, to some extent, resemble the Hotel California. “Mirrors on the ceiling. The pink champagne on ice. And the sporting directors said, ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device’.”
https://theathletic.com/3398011/2022/07/05/serie-a-transfers-loans/
Serie A’s summer of savings: How Italian clubs have steered clear of transfer fees
In the garden of the Grand Hotel Rimini, sporting directors came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. For the third year in a row, Italy’s transfer window opened on the same stretch of Adriatic coastline, where the most celebrated regista (director) of them all, Andrea Pirlo Federico Fellini, was born.
Disappointingly for the film buffs waiting tables, any discussion about 8½ was limited to the loan fee that Inter Milan have agreed to pay Chelsea for Romelu Lukaku. Amid the clinking glasses, general managers like Roma’s Tiago Pinto defended their profession from comparisons with Fellini’s Vitelloni, the layabouts and slackers in a dead-end town that could be Serie A. “I’m right in thinking the window only opened yesterday, aren’t I?” he smiled while introducing the club’s new back-up goalkeeper Mile Svilar to the media.
Svilar was out of contract at Benfica and isn’t alone in moving to Serie A on a Bosman. The next player Pinto unveiled on Monday was Nemanja Matic, a curious twist of fate if you recall that Manchester United-Benfica game at Old Trafford five years ago when his shot hit the post, ricocheted off Svilar’s back and went in.
Jose Mourinho was the home side’s manager at the time and the remnants of the last United team to win a trophy are spread throughout the league. Matic replaces Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who turned down the new contract Roma were offering to follow the footsteps of his old captain Edin Dzeko in moving to Inter, where “Mkhi” becomes the first Armenian ever to play for the club — unless, of course, you count France international Youri Djorkaeff.
Activity has not been lacking, then. A lot of the yellow-ticker, we-interrupt-this-programme business has come in Serie A this summer with Lukaku returning to Inter for next to nothing and Paul Pogba set to do the same with Juventus, at least in fees, after leaving for a combined €225 million.
While it is undoubtedly a coup to bring the league’s former MVP back to San Siro just a year after he left and the deja vu is palpable in seeing a World Cup winner return on a free transfer a decade on from the last one that enabled him to move to Turin, it would be wrong to categorise either as a low-cost operation. Lukaku’s lawyer Sebastien Ladure insists he doesn’t understand where reports of his client taking a wage cut come from and that “Big Rom” is now the highest-paid player in Serie A.
Inter are paying around €25 million between loan fee and salary knowing “all” they’ll get in return are goals as Lukaku remains under Chelsea’s control, with no option to buy included in the deal. As for Pogba, the Frenchman is expected to sign for approximately the same pay packet as the one Paulo Dybala requested, despite missing more game time at United (80 games!) than his former team-mate and good friend did these past three years at Juventus.
Minestra riscaldata (reheated soup) is being served. The taste test in Italian football tends to show it’s never as good as the first time. Rather than send it back to the kitchen, the hope is that second helpings will still be nutritious enough to make Inter and Juventus stronger. Encouragement comes, of course, from Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who may not have been quite as fresh as he was in 2011 but still contributed to Milan winning the league 11 years after his first Scudetto with the club.
While the Swede recovers from the ACL repair he needed after six months of training and occasionally playing without one, Milan found another free agent in Divock Origi to compete with the team’s other forwards and deliver some of the big goals that made him such a cult hero at Liverpool.
A cutting edge was lacking at times last season, which is why Milan chose to reserve a big chunk of their transfer budget for a right winger/No 10 like Charles De Ketelaere rather than invest it in Lille’s Sven Botman, who joined Newcastle United instead. A cast-iron defence is what won Milan the league rather than an attack that ranked as only the fourth-most prolific in Serie A.
Cousins Inter scored 15 more goals than them — not that it mattered in the end as the failure of back-up goalkeeper Ionut Radu to keep one out in Bologna swung the Scudetto away from the holders. Failing to provide captain Samir Handanovic with adequate cover cost Inter even under Simone Inzaghi’s predecessor Antonio Conte, who must have been frustrated to watch his team literally drop points when the veteran Daniele Padelli deputised for the Slovenian.
It’s a position Inter needed to fill more than the centre-forward role, where they encountered few problems in moving on from Lukaku. The out-of-contract Ajax goalkeeper Andre Onana steps into the breach and at 26, will succeed, in the not-too-distant future, the soon-to-be-38-year-old Handanovic.
Pre-season began on Monday and as much as coaches would have liked all their most wanted recruits to already be signed, sealed and delivered, the transfer market, as Pinto points out, still has almost two months to run. Perhaps it will only truly take off if Roma sell Nicolo Zaniolo, Inter and Paris Saint-Germain agree a price for Milan Skriniar, and Chelsea meet Juventus’s conditions for the purchase of Matthijs de Ligt.
The biggest deal done so far for cash, excluding the options to make existing loans permanent, is the €12 million Sassuolo are spending on 21-year-old Uruguay international Agustin Alvarez, presumably under the assumption that Gianluca Scamacca is on his way.
Frugality is everywhere — that is, with the exception of Monza, who are about to make their Serie A debut and won’t limit themselves to classing survival as a successful season. Silvio Berlusconi and Adriano Galliani want European football, and are showing ambition by going after Mauro Icardi who, lest we forget, makes €12 million a year at PSG.
The rest of the league is keeping what powder there is as dry as possible.
It’s a reminder of the enduring impact of the pandemic on continental European football. Juventus have recapitalised the club twice in the past three years to the tune of around €700 million; a huge amount considering their market cap is €892 million. Chief executive Maurizio Arrivabene told Tuttosport last week: “You don’t resolve a crisis by waving a magic wand from one day to the next. The June 2022 accounts will still be blood and tears.”
Inter lost a record €245.6 million last year and needed emergency finance from Oaktree Capital Management. Roma were €185.3 million in the red and The Friedkin Group has already invested more than half a billion. Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis claims the club is €220 million down on where it otherwise should be after missing out on the Champions League for a couple of years and acting as if the pandemic would soon blow over by making Victor Osimhen the most expensive player in their history a few months into a global health crisis. The squeeze is changing the landscape of Serie A.
Four top-flight clubs switched hands last season. Another handful are up for sale. The league is fighting the exact parameters of a cost-control mechanism called the liquidity index and teams preparing for Europe are wary of sanctions by UEFA, even if Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations are to be applied with a lighter touch when taking the pandemic into account.
At a time when the Premier League was able to roll over its existing domestic TV deals and grow the pie even more on an international level by signing a six-year contract in the US alone worth €2.3 billion, Serie A recorded a drop in local rights and is only now ending two years without any exposure at all in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa).
On the bright side, Serie A will soon be able to sell its international rights for longer after an amendment to the Melandri Law. Why does that matter? Fans in other markets no longer get lost in the shuffle as the league changes channels every three years. Broadcasters aren’t having to think about renewal costs after 18 months. Instead, they can keep growing an audience and creating value. As the rights become more lucrative, the money flowing back into the league should become greater and more resources will be available to be ploughed back into teams and, hopefully, infrastructure.
Until then, the transfer market will look like it does today with Napoli letting Lorenzo Insigne and Dries Mertens run their contracts down, Inter weighing up whether they can do Dybala on a free, Juventus figuring that a 34-year-old Angel Di Maria on a Bosman is a short-term fix for a team determined to be champions again, and Lazio hoping Alessio Romagnoli chooses the club he supported as a boy over a newly-promoted Premier League club Fulham, who can offer him higher wages.
By the same token, Milan know, as was the case with Newcastle and Botman, that Leeds United — a team that narrowly escaped Premier League relegation last year — can out-bid them for De Ketelaere should they wish to sign the Belgium international from Club Brugge. All Milan can do is accentuate the appeal of playing for a seven-time Champions League winner at a stadium as iconic as San Siro on a Scudetto-winning team because, were it to come down to purchasing power alone, there’s no contest with the Super Premier League and its constituents.
This is the reality. Of course, it didn’t make Serie A any less compelling last season. The league didn’t miss Cristiano Ronaldo, Gigio Donnarumma or Lukaku. It still went down to the final day. Fiorentina got into Europe, Roma won a trophy and Salernitana pulled off a great escape. Another fine season awaits us. And yet, the Grand Hotel Rimini does, to some extent, resemble the Hotel California. “Mirrors on the ceiling. The pink champagne on ice. And the sporting directors said, ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device’.”
https://theathletic.com/3398011/2022/07/05/serie-a-transfers-loans/
