Football's Secret Trade: How the Player Transfer Market was Infiltrated (Bloomberg) by Alex Duff & Tariq Panja

Author:Alex Duff & Tariq Panja [Duff, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119145424
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-03-28T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Buenos Aires to Manchester

Investment funds were emerging across Europe to service the demand for credit among clubs. Ray Ranson, a former Manchester City defender, had flirted with the business of transfer rights before the scandal involving the oligarchs and West Ham. From an office in Manchester, he was making a new push. “There are hundreds of millions of euros of demand out there” from European clubs, Ranson said. “The banks are shut.”

His company, R2 Asset Management, could not operate in the English Premier League because of the ban that Richard Scudamore had implemented, but there were clubs willing to sell him the transfer rights of players in France, Spain, Denmark and Switzerland.

Other financiers followed suit. In Germany, banker Kai-Volker Langhinrichs raised €1 million to invest in the Bundesliga and hired Hamburg midfielder-turned-scout Harald Spörl to advise on which players to take a bet on. In Paris, Laurent Pichonnier, a partner of Fairplay Capital, sounded out the 20 clubs in the French first division. He said that all but Paris Saint Germain and Monaco were interested in doing business.

These fledgling funds, which were more sophisticated than many of the informal investment groups that operated in football, could trace their roots back to an initiative by Boca Juniors in Buenos Aires. La Boca, or “The Mouth”, is the opening of the Riachuelo River and was the arrival point of many Spanish and Italian immigrants to Argentina. Its brightly painted houses and cobbled streets have since become a tourist draw, and tango dancers and painters come out during the day seeking business. After dark, the barrio is a far edgier place and guidebooks advise tourists against walking its streets. Murals on street walls show Diego Maradona holding his arms aloft in Boca's navy blue and yellow shirt and Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara staring defiantly out at the rest of the world with a steely gaze. Rising up from the neighbourhood is La Bombonera, the “Chocolate Box” stadium where Boca plays had brought the teenage Maradona from Argentinos Juniors.

Seven years later, in 1982, Maradona fetched a world record fee of about $8 million when Boca Juniors traded him to Barcelona. But like in Brazil, such financial windfalls were unpredictable for teams. Boca did not know when they would next make a big sale to a European club. At the same time, Boca fans demanded success and supremacy against arch rival River Plate. So, Boca's presidents were pressurized into spending above the club's means to assemble the best team possible. To raise cash at short notice, Boca Juniors quietly cut deals to sell the transfer rights of players to businessmen. The opaque transactions would come out into the open when Mauricio Macri was elected president of the club in 1995.

The son of a successful businessman in the construction industry, Macri went to university to study civil engineering and then took a course at New York's Columbia Business School before working for his father and as a credit analyst at Citibank. One Saturday in

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