It’s pre-season training at a big Premier League club a year ago. The sun is shining, players are laughing as they relive antics from the beach. Coaching staff are putting the final touches to their preparations.
Optimism fills the air – with one exception. Within the ranks of suntanned and toned players is what, within football, is known as a ‘transfer terrorist’.
The transfer terrorist – in this case a defender – is desperate to leave. He is raging at a perceived injustice. He believes the powers-that-be in the boardroom had repeatedly broken promises.
Across multiple windows he has made it clear he wants to go to a club closer to his home but a transfer had failed to materialise, despite what he had felt was a fair offer. And he has had enough!
Mail Sport has spoken to managers, officials and players across English football to uncover exactly what happens when wantaway stars go rogue.
They have agreed to talk only under the cloak of anonymity, and what follows is a story of deceptions, tantrums and downright intimidation.
Carlos Tevez (furthest right) refused to come off the bench for Manchester City against Bayern Munich in 2011 and was banished from the first team for five months
Alexander Isak is currently 1,000 miles from Newcastle – training at the facilities of Real Sociedad, his former club
Back to the sulking defender, fuming on the training pitch.
His teammates had ignored him for much of the session but, eventually, the ball is played to him. Our transfer terrorist casually bends over, picks up the ball and, to the astonishment of his team-mates, clinically volleys it clean over the fence.
The coaching staff, well aware of his ‘situation’ in the background, let it slide. They are happy to let the player make his point and move on. But then he does it again. And again.
‘Come on, son,’ said the assistant manager, ‘I know you’re upset but you need to be a professional.’
The response is sharp and not-so sweet. ‘F*** off,’ our man says. ‘And if you don’t f*** off, I’ll knock you out.’
Players trying to force a move is as old as the hills. This summer, Newcastle are refusing to confirm whether Alexander Isak, who has jetted 1,000 miles to Spain to train with his previous club Real Sociedad amid a bid from Liverpool, has gone AWOL.
And Brentford’s Yoane Wissa is training on his own with several clubs circling, including Newcastle.
In the past, some players have been upfront enough to admit they went on strike.
Here’s Marcos Rojo on his reaction to learning that Manchester United were trying to sign him from Sporting Lisbon: ‘I was in Portugal when my agent told me. He asked me to stay calm but I could not.
‘I started living this dream. I could not think of anything else. I would call him every day, but when it seemed the transfer would not happen then I refused to work with Sporting.’
Now you might wonder what’s new – you might wonder whether players have been holding their clubs to ransom for decades? Well what’s new in the modern era is the lengths the transfer terrorist will go to in their covert campaigns, and the breadth of methods employed.
‘Online doctors have become the best friend,’ explains one senior executive at a Championship club. ‘Getting a sick note online is probably easier than it’s ever been.
‘We’re now getting situations where a player wants to leave and starts to act up. We’ll then get an email from an online doctor along with an attachment. You can guess what’s in the attachment before you even open it.
‘It’ll be a sick note. Often it’s to say they have flu symptoms and should isolate. That’s a clever one because the manager won’t want to risk calling their bluff because if they really are ill you don’t want half your squad catching it. A back injury can also be quite a common one.’
Transfer windows, understandably, can be a particularly active time. ‘Trying to get someone on a pre-season training camp if there’s a move in the offing can be tricky,’ the executive adds. ‘You’d be amazed how many times a passport can go missing.’
Tugging at heartstrings is another recurring theme. One Scottish former player tells me he was offered almost double his wages to move from a club in the Midlands to one in the north. Who wouldn’t want to double their money?
Marcos Rojo refused to work with Sporting Lisbon when it became clear Manchester United wanted to sign him following his breakthrough performances at the 2014 World Cup
But he tried a more subtle approach to ensure the transfer went through.
‘I went to see the manager, who didn’t want to sell me, and told him that my wife had struggled to settle and was really homesick,’ he explains. ‘I laid it on thick. I said that she was having a really bad time being away from all of her friends and family and that the move would be a huge help for us as it would get her closer to home. He took some persuading but eventually he said yes and we were off.’
Fast forward a couple of months, and the player, his wife and the former manager met at a social event. ‘He asked my wife how she was settling in. She replied, in a thick Brummie accent, that where we were living now was miles better than Birmingham!’
The training ground is where much of this high-risk, multi-million pound game of chess plays out. An executive at one of English football’s biggest clubs offers up the tale of one player who simply refused to be picked.
‘We had a midfielder, talented boy, who fell out with the manager,’ he recalls. ‘We had a training session and the boss had him whipping in crosses for the strikers. His first two were beauties – right on the spot.
‘The manager stopped the session and told him that if he could continue to do that he’d be back in from the cold and in contention for the team at the weekend. The bloke was on a decent contract and didn’t mind sitting on the bench and picking up his money.
‘He put his next three set-pieces into the side-netting – literally just kicked them out of play. He had a move lined up at the end of the season and he had absolutely no intention of getting back into the side and putting himself at risk of injury.’
Only in football? Those who work in other industries will wonder how they get away with it.
Players have been using online doctors to say they are sick or injured so they can avoid coming in and carry out a covert campaign
‘The fluffy football contract is the most protected thing in the employment world,’ bemoans one chairman. ‘The problem is that the player – and their agent – hold all the aces.
‘While there is time left on the contract they are of value to the club because you can sell them for a fee. But if they fall out with you they can run that contract down and go elsewhere for free. And if you sack them, which is often what they want, they can also go for nothing.
‘It often becomes a stand-off. We had one player, who will not be missed, from overseas. A club came in and were nowhere near the fee we wanted. His head was turned and he wanted to go.
‘When we rejected the offer and he found out he threatened to go and live at home for two years until his contract expired. We threatened to fine him for every day he missed but in the end it was best for all parties if he left and he got his way.’
Even fines have their limits. ‘It’s a historic thing but it’s built into player contracts that the most you can fine them is two weeks’ wages,’ he adds. ‘So apply that to Isak. What does he care if he gets fined two weeks’ money? He’ll no doubt make that back in a week on his new deal at Liverpool. He’s going to win the lottery.’
Players often find a willing ally in their commission-chasing agents. ‘They can control the market,’ another executive explains. ‘So if the player wants to go to a certain club the agent will tell us that. If someone else comes in they will tell them not to bother because a deal with the other club has already been agreed.’
Another chairman calls it getting the player ‘pregnant on the deal’. ‘It’s like when you bring a puppy home and show it to the kids but tell them that it’s just for a look and that you might send it back,’ he explains.
‘The kids fall in love with it and the reality is that you are never sending it back. It’s the same when the agent tells the player about the club they want them to go to. They sell them all the positives – the money, the facilities, all of that. They get them pregnant on the deal and there’s no chance they will want to do anything other than leave.’
Newcastle could fine Isak if he goes on strike – but what’s that to the player if they are able to get a massive pay rise out of the move?
The chairman also believes the trained eye can often tell who has a deal lined up. ‘Especially at the back end of the window,’ they add. ‘You’ll see some who aren’t going anywhere near a tackle.’
At one northern Premier League club, a London-based player took to the air to show his unrest. ‘He moved back to London and started commuting,’ a source recalls. ‘For a time he was turning up at the training ground in a helicopter.’
Sometimes the players are subtle, other times their desire to move is naked. Who can forget Carlos Tevez’s messy attempts to break free from Manchester City? Or Dimitri Payet’s ugly campaign to shake off a £100,000-a-week deal at West Ham?
Others have been equally brazen. On a 2011 pre-season tour of the United States, Newcastle staff were left aghast when Jose Enrique, denied a move to Liverpool, pulled out his phone and decided to let the world know of his situation via a post on Twitter.
One of the best tales, however, is one that has already been relayed to Mail Sport.
In an interview more than 20 years ago, ex-West Ham United boss Harry Redknapp told of the time Paolo Di Canio was approached by Gianluca Vialli, when his compatriot was manager at Chelsea, and offered double his salary to cross from east to west London.
Di Canio demanded to know what West Ham were going to do about it, and so Redknapp approached his chairman, Terence Brown. Brown quickly called for a meeting in his office with the talismanic playmaker and his agent.
For good measure, he promptly stuffed a portrait of the legendary Bobby Moore behind a filing cabinet and replaced it with a picture of Di Canio himself.
Harry Redknapp tells a story of how Paolo di Canio worked his way into a new big-money deal at West Ham
Following the summit and a long period of tough negotiating, Brown triumphantly called Redknapp into his office to tell him that he had sorted it, and had matched Chelsea’s offer to keep the brilliant Italian at Upton Park.
He then went to make the pair a celebratory cup of tea but returned with his face as pale of a sheet. While the kettle was on, the radio in the kitchenette had relayed the day’s big breaking news to Brown: Vialli had been sacked.
That’s the world of the transfer terrorists, where our heroes can be two-faced, devious and disingenuous as they play the hugely lucrative game of breaking free from one multi-million pound contract to sign a new, even bigger deal.
