EPL riches a lifeline for continental clubs

LONDON — Suddenly, Le Havre AC has choices. As is the case with most teams in France’s second division, money is usually tight for Arnaud Tanguy, Le Havre’s chief executive. There are salaries to be paid and bills to be settled. Tanguy’s job, more often than not, is to make ends meet.

This summer, though, Le Havre finds itself with a windfall, in some ways an unwelcome one.

The club came out of Europe’s summer transfer window some US$10 million (S$13.6 million) richer, thanks almost exclusively to the Premier League’s insatiable appetite for talent. It is not enough to make Le Havre a financial powerhouse, but it is enough to aim a little higher, to think a little bigger.

“We have still not decided what to do with it,” said Tanguy of the money. He could lay new fields and hire new coaches. He also has his eye on a video analysis suite and the addition of a sports psychologist to the club’s respected, but ageing, youth academy.

Premier League stars Paul Pogba, Dimitri Payet and Riyad Mahrez, among many others, all cut their teeth at Le Havre, but the buildings are “30 or 40 years old”. More than a coat of paint is required.

Tanguy said, however, that he would rather not have the money at all. Of that US$10 million, about US$3 million is a so-called solidarity contribution due to Le Havre from Juventus for Le Havre’s part in nurturing Pogba for three years as a youth player (under Fifa statutes, all clubs that helped develop a young player are entitled to a small portion of any subsequent transfer fees).

The rest, a vast majority, came from the sale of Lys Mousset, a 20-year-old forward, to Premier League stragglers Bournemouth.

Tanguy said he would prefer to have Mousset, a member of France’s under-20 team, available for selection by Le Havre’s American coach, Bob Bradley, for the new season. He is no fool, though. He knows the US$10 million can represent a sea change in the life of Le Havre AC.

On the other side of the Channel, the perspective is very different.

Mousset’s arrival barely caused a ripple in England. By the standards of the Premier League’s first billion-pound transfer window, one in which 13 clubs broke their own transfer records, some of them more than once, a US$7 million player ranked as little more than an afterthought.

Few, in England, are surprised by the scale of the spending. Many realised that rampant inflation, and the European clubs’ determination to extract the highest price possible from their Premier League counterparts, would be the consequence of the Premier League’s new US$6.8 billion broadcast deal.

“Everybody thinks money is almost a bottomless pit and everyone can get a piece of it,” Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish told The Times of London. His counterpart at Stoke City, Peter Coates, said he felt “all of the European clubs were rubbing their hands together” at the prospect of a Premier League team coming calling.

When the transfer window closed, a vast majority of the Premier League’s transfer money was indeed spent on imports: US$214 million to Germany’s Bundesliga, US$199 million to the Spanish Liga, US$182 million to Serie A in Italy, US$161 million to France’s Ligue 1, and hundreds of millions more to Brazil, Belgium, Poland and all points in between.

The tendency, whenever the Premier League dips into its ever-expanding pockets, is to focus on what impact that spending has on the English game: Whether the players are of the quality needed to improve the Premier League, and whether they detract from the country’s beleaguered national team.

If anything, though, the effects are even more profound on the continent. As the window closed on Wednesday, Coates remarked that selling a player to the Premier League can keep European clubs “going for a couple of years”. That is an exaggeration, but one that, in a way, encapsulates the problem.

In the transfer market, England thinks about the here and now. In leagues reluctantly subsidised by the Premier League’s wealth, there are many clubs that look far beyond it.

Like Le Havre, Sporting Lisbon is home to one of the most celebrated academy systems in world soccer. It can count Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Figo and Nani among its alumni. The US$38.5 million sale of striker Islam Slimani to Leicester City on Wednesday will allow Sporting to continue to invest “significantly” in their facilities, said vice-president Carlos Vieira.

Just as important, Slimani’s move to England will help attract more players.

“Sporting’s model does not rely on the sale of players,” said Vieira. “However, the visibility Sporting has as a platform helps us to hire players. Sporting has frequently transferred players that perform well in better leagues. Players understand what visibility coming to Sporting gives them.”

Slimani broke down in tears after his last game in Portugal. Many fans, too, were upset to see the 28-year-old Algerian go. His departure, though, simply continues the cycle. Success brings money, and money brings success. There are few better examples than Belgian club Genk. The sales of Thibaut Courtois and Kevin de Bruyne to Chelsea in 2011 and 2012 allowed the team to spend US$11 million refurbishing their youth academy.

This summer — in another move that passed almost unnoticed in England — Genk sold defender Christian Kabasele to Watford, for US$7.7 million. That will help with the running costs of its youth academy, with about US$4.5 million of Genk’s US$27 million annual turnover spent on development. “We like to think of ourselves as the example academy in Belgium,” said Patrick Janssens, the chief executive.

Yet, in losing the battle to keep Kabasele, Janssens ensured he could win a larger and potentially more lucrative war on more valuable properties, such as Leon Bailey, a Jamaican striker, and Wilfred Ndidi, a Nigerian midfielder, two other Genk players who are among the best prospects in Belgium.

“We had offers of more than €10 million for both of them, but because we sold Kabasele, it helped us to turn those offers down,” said Janssens. “That will allow us, we hope, to compete for the Belgian championship ... and ... see them continue to develop as players with us.”

Janssens knows the time will come to sell Bailey and Ndidi, but he also knows that the longer they stay, the more they will cost. Finally, he knows the Premier League will come calling soon enough.

THE NEW YORK TIMES