Transfers...a/k/a selling or trading a player

To those familiar with more established American sports such as Baseball, Basketball, American Football, etc., the bi-annual periods every January and summer--known as transfer windows--can be a little confusing. In European football, there are no "drafts" for younger players as we know, and the "trading" of veteran players is not as common as the outright purchase of them.

The system is basically setup to reward clubs (the more common lingo for "team") if a player they have invested in or developed moves to a different club. Often, players will outgrow a "smaller club" and demand more spotlight, stronger competition, and ultimately more money which only the larger clubs can provide. Assuming the player is still under contract, the teams wishing to sign the player must first satisfy the financial requirements of the player's home club before negotiating salary, benefits, etc with the player.

As it turns out, some of these transfers can be quite lucrative for the "sellers". For example, In 1996, Arsenal paid French club, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) £500,000 to sign 17 year old Nicolas Anelka. Just a couple of seasons later in 1999 Real Madrid (pronounced re-Al, like the name Albert) paid Arsenal £22,300,000 to secure the Frenchman's services.

Some times players are loaned to other clubs, either in hopes of eventually selling the player to the other club, or to enable a young player to get more playing time in the starting line-up (called the "first-team" in the lingo).

In the current transfer window, there is a lot of drama surrounding the pending transfer of Argentine striker, Carlos Tevez. Tevez played last season at the London based West Ham United. Apparently, a third party corporation was the holder of his contract and he was in effect "loaned" to West Ham. To compare this to the American sports landscape, it would bee as if Derek Jeeter was under contract with Morgan Stanley and then loaned to the Yankees to play baseball. It seems that as part of this loan deal, there was an agreement that if/when Tevez was sold to another club, the third party would maintain the rights to the monetary proceeds. The problem is that the governing body of the top English league (EPL, English Premier League, or Premiership) maintains that only clubs can hold contracts of players. This was investigated during the season, and in order to maintain Tevez' eligibility as a EPL player West Ham informed the league that the agreement had been terminated. The recent turn of events is that Manchester United have agreed to financial terms with the third party and Tevez to transfer the league Champions, but West Ham is still maintaining that they alone hold the rights to Tevez. Basically it is a big mess, and since there is probably $40-60 million at stake, it will take a court to sort out. Again, this is not something we are used to in U.S. sports.