Inside Football's Transfer Market! | TIFO

In the space of twelve weeks, a hyper-ventilating global football industry exchanges billions of pounds as a coterie of chairmen, agents, footballers and their families enter a high-stakes poker bonanza to outwit one another and grasp their cut of the winnings. It’s the transfer window, where money meets machismo, and for which the public have an insatiable appetite. Over the past year, the term “Arsenal transfers” has been searched 4.4 million times on Google, “Manchester United transfers” 3.6 million times. The interest is breathless and global. Google Trends’ popularity rankings show that the fiercest online browsing over Premier League transfers takes place in Uganda, South Sudan and Kenya. This is a domestic gameshow gone global and it is only getting bigger.

The glamorous image flatters the reality though and The Athletic has spoken to chairmen, executives, sporting directors, agents and players to reveal the dark arts that take place behind the scenes and the startlingly ordinary conversations at the industry’s heart. In the closing days of May, the pinging and beeping of iPhones becomes relentless. With football transfers requiring steady communication, WhatsApp provides the perfect platform, with more than 1.5bn users and 60bn messages exchanged daily.

It allows users to organise group chats and most football clubs now have a WhatsApp “Transfer Chat” for the owner, chairman, chief executive, head of recruitment and manager. All group chats have several sub-chats. One Football League chairman says that: “There are breakouts from the main chat for bitching and sniping. But the real reason we use WhatsApp are the blue ticks. These tell you whether a message has been read and whether an agent, a player or a club has seen our interest or our offer.”

The blue ticks work both ways, as agents bombard clubs with proposals. A sporting director at a major English club described the experience of being spammed with generic information. “The end of May is red hot on WhatsApp. The best ones are the copy and paste agents. They don’t even bother typing your name in or showing why the player would suit your team or your club. It just reads “Hi there…We have ”X“ player available.” We see through it. They are sending the same message to every club at the same time.” “It’s not only on WhatsApp”, continued the chairman. “I had messages from 125 agents in three weeks last year. Every form of communication: phone calls, emails, LinkedIn. I hadn’t heard of most of these people. Are they even real? I had five agents all claiming to represent one French player. The other anxiety is screenshots. I was worried about being scammed if I replied to people. Would they take a screenshot and post it onto Twitter or give it to the tabloids?

Then I would look really silly.” One sporting director in Scandinavia believes WhatsApp screenshots are used to stage hikes in salaries and transfer fees. “’Bids are now made on WhatsApp between clubs” he explained. “Only the final offer, once everything is thrashed out, will be made on paper via email. An agent will send me a screenshot from his player to say I must have £10,000 thrown onto this as a signing fee.’ Then it makes it look like the player is driving the negotiations, rather than the agent. But we know it is collusion; led by the agent to get more money out of us. And then there are the benefits they throw in…”

As television rights have grown and the game has become awash with cash, the demands of footballers and their agents have become steadily bolder. When he moved to Tottenham from Newcastle, Paul Gascoigne asked for a sunbed for his sister. Thirty years later, players are considerably more brazen.