Steel - Free transfer

Apparently.

 

I've spent 6 hours transferring steel today sick of it now though

 

A year left on contract. Consistently in the top 3 for POTY regardless of who else is at the club. Loves the club. Given away

I cant work out why we are never sucessful

 

Bens answer well you could say it was a free transfer and I suppose it was in one sense but in another sense no that's totally wrong, unfortunately it's all covered with confidentiality agreements so I can't comment any further

 

From Greek journo : Expect Panathinaikos to sign him without giving money. They claim he is a free agent.

 

Assuming that that is right, have we told him he can go for nowt of he can find a club that we are happy with?

 

If Steele hasn't asked for a transfer aren't we under an obligation to pay his contract up if we sell him? Ergo, if a club offers us £200k to sign him, but we need to pay £200k in wages to offload him, what's the point. In situations like this, with long serving players, the done thing is to cut out the middle man, not ask for the fee and let the player negotiate a lucrative signing on fee and/or higher wages from the new club, who suddenly have £200k more to play with. So it saves us a load of admin and rewards said long serving player. And the bonus to us is he's off the wage bill and we've even saved a year at Championship wages. That's how I understand it to work anyway.

Of course, the downside is we've lost a very good and popular player who would probably have been the best keeper in the division next season and would have probably been responsible for a good many points. Let's just hope that we have an adequate replacement lined up, because the only decent keepers we've had since we got back into the Championship were Steele, Muller and Butland.

 

Thanks Gordon, that seems like a most likely explanation.

 

Yes. 100%.

 

Thought so, which is why some Premiership prima donna was quoted the other day as saying he wants a transfer to some other moneybags club, but he fell short of submitting an actual transfer request, which would have negated his rights to being paid up. Different world footballers live in to the rest of us!

 

True.

 

I've never heard that before. Is that right?

 

Really? Must admit, I've never heard that before, mate.

 

Me neither. Just doesn't seem right.

 

Happened to a player I know. He was happy to leave, but didn't request the move. He'd moved to the area of his current club, the new club was other end of the country, wage offered by new club was a big reduction, etc etc. Agent plays hard ball and they thrash out a compensation figure. It's not the full monies that he'd have earned over the rest of his contract, but it's a hefty chunk of money all the same. It's written into most contracts of footballers in the top flight, and a fair few I'd imagine in the Championship these days. Agents then take a percentage of it too. Seriously, the amount of fine print and detail in these contracts is unreal.

Different world? Without a doubt.

 

FTR though, I have no idea if Steele's in this situation. I'm not privy to that information. But, if we've freed him then I expect that this is the reason why.

 

But that's not the same as the club having to pay a player's remaining contract up in order for him to leave.

 

Yes, it's why you see things like David Perkins leaving on a free whilst under contract. It also plays havoc with those players winding down their contracts who are on far bigger wages than any transfer fees are likely to be. The Kennedy one, for example, is a no win situation for us. Nobody (in their right mind) would pay us a fee that would cover what we'd have to pay him in wages, and as he is unlikely to command those wages elsewhere, there is no advantage in him waiving the rest of his Reds contract to sign terms elsewhere. If he could, for example, get a two or three year deal on the same wages by moving elsewhere, BFC would undoubtedly waive the transfer fee if he would waive his last year's salary with us, as he would have the security of a longer contract with the new club.

There's absolutely no reason for him to leave us now though, as it would take him two years to earn what he'll earn at Barnsley during the next year, so better for him to stick around and hope he doesn't get injured. This is why we tried negotiating a pay off for him to leave us in January, but he didn't go for that. And that is why you see clubs subsidising players' wages after they have left, a la McFrail when he played for us, whereby Leeds were still paying him £8k of his weekly £10k wage.

It would probably make financial sense for us to subsidise his wages by £1k per week if he could find another club and get himself a longer term deal. He'd be taking the hit over the first year and then his wages would drop for the final couple of years, but over the three years he'd probably do better than if he ran his contract down with us and then couldn't find a club in 12 months time. We could then bring a better replacement in and the replacement's wages, plus the £1k we'd be paying Kennedy for the next year, would still be cheaper than paying Kennedy's full wage and we'd have a better player!