The Club by Joshua Robinson

Author:Joshua Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that the already cutthroat business of Premier League transfers saw the process of buying and selling players become more furious than ever in the late 2000s and early 2010s. When Premier League clubs splashed out £485 million in the summer of 2011, a 33 percent surge on the previous year, it looked like an anomaly. In fact, it was merely the start of a collective hysteria that caused the combined expenditure of Premier League clubs to jump in each of the next five seasons, culminating in the free-for-all of 2016, when spending by the league’s twenty clubs broke the £1 billion mark for the first time.

Don’t think for a minute, however, that this major-league cash flow eradicated cheap tricks from the transfer market. If anything, clubs, agents, and even players became even more creative and outrageous in their efforts to force through deals or gazump their rivals. Genteel verbal contracts and handshakes between gentlemen went out the window. Operating in the transfer market had always been like swimming in a piranha tank. Now it was as if someone had introduced a school of ill-tempered manta rays for good measure.

The Premier League got its first glimpse of this a few years earlier, when Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea finally succeeded in its mission to poach one of Arsenal’s top players. In the end, it wasn’t Thierry Henry who made the move from North London to West London but the defender Ashley Cole. The Blues’ interest in him made perfect sense: the twenty-five-year-old was one of the world’s top left-backs, a mainstay of the England national team, and firmly in his prime. The surprise was how they went about signing him. On January 27, 2005, the various parties assembled in the lobby of the Royal Park Hotel, which was around the corner from the Lancaster Gate where the Premier League had been formed more than a decade earlier. Cole brought his agent, Jonathan Barnett, while José Mourinho and Peter Kenyon made up the Chelsea delegation. The ubiquitous superagent Pini Zahavi was also present, as he would be for seemingly every major transfer that unfolded during that decade.

Over drinks and bar snacks, the group sketched out the vague parameters of Cole’s contract with Chelsea, his off-field requirements, and how he would fit into Mourinho’s first-team lineup. All of which was standard fare for a transfer negotiation except for one minor detail: Cole was midway through a five-year contract with Arsenal, which had received no approach from Chelsea for their player, making the entire meeting a clear breach of Premier League rules. When the British tabloids caught wind of the secret transfer talks, it marked the first time most soccer fans ever heard the term “tapping up”—the illicit practice of turning a rival player’s head and paving the way for a future transfer. It would not be the last.

When the Premier League opened an investigation into the matter, Cole’s agent swiftly attempted to defuse the situation, categorically denying that any meeting with Chelsea had taken place.

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