#AgainstModernFootball - undisclosed transfer fees

Earlier this week Southampton publicly heralded the arrival of Sofiane Boufal as a club-record signing. The Moroccan attacking midfielder was paraded with all the fanfare you would expect of a club-record signing, posing in his new shirt, shaking the hand of his new manager and featuring in a number of viral videos aimed at getting his name trending on social media. All that was missing was ticker-tape. Oh, and a transfer fee.

That’s right, Southampton billed Boufal as the most expensive signing in the club’s history without actually disclosing how expensive he was. They used that term ‘undisclosed fee’ which has become part of the tedious lexicon concerning football’s transfer market. “Just believe us,” the press release might as well have read, “he cost us a lot of money.” It’s the footballing equivalent of a teenager refusing to tell their parents just how much money they splurged on a fancy new pair of trainers.

Media in France reported the true fee to be around £15.9 million, which would indeed make him the biggest signing ever made by the Saints. Hull City did the same with their “club-record” capture of midfielder Ryan Mason from Spurs, refusing to admit just how much they had spent on a decidedly average player. Again, it was up to the media to reveal that the Tigers had paid just over £10 million.

But that’s not really the point. At a time when the Premier League is all too eager to puff out its chest and boast about just how lucrative it is, clubs should have some sort of duty to show where that money is going.

So called undisclosed fees allow for all sorts to be hidden from fans. Agent fees will be included in the final fee, with clubs reluctant to illustrate just how much is being syphoned into their pockets. There are additional fees and buy-back clauses to conceal as well. Disclosing the fees behind some transfers would expose a rather ugly side to the game.

Of course, it’s quintessentially British not to talk about money - Brits are more uncomfortable chatting cash than Boris Johnson on a visit to the Olympic Stadium - but the transfer market offers an escapism from the real world. While it is distasteful to boast about money in other areas of society, the same does not apply to football. Fans want to know just how much their new signing cost. They want to talk about it.

Sometimes it comes down to politics. For instance, when Real Madrid made Gareth Bale the most expensive football player in history they refused to officially disclose just how much cash had been wired to White Hart Lane for fear of upsetting Cristiano Ronaldo, their figurehead and until then the reigning Most Expensive Player In The World. Even when club president Florentino Perez was pressed on the true figure, he denied that Bale had cost more than Ronaldo.

At other times, clubs deliberately do their best to underline just how much precisely they have spent on a player, or how much they have sold a player for. Look at the world-record deal that took Paul Pogba from Juventus to Manchester United this summer. Juve were keen to show that they hadn’t buckled by selling their prize asset, while United wanted to demonstrate that they could once again compete at the very top end of the transfer market for the best players. It suited both to disclose the £89 million fee (plus add-ons) passed between the clubs.

The transfer market has become an overly-complicated, convoluted place over the past decade or so and ‘undisclosed fees’ are a symptom of that. They snap ‘none of your business’ at fans curious enough to query what their clubs are doing with their ticket money. Inadvertently, they further accentuate the detachment between the modern game on the pitch and the customers, as clubs now seem them, watching in the stands.

Modern football has become something of a real-life fantasy football game, with the transfer market at the core of that. There’s an innate satisfaction to putting a value on a player’s head, but rules must be followed. One such rule is rather straightforward - if clubs want to let it known that a new signing is a record fee, at least tell us the actual fee. If you don’t want the fee to be known, don’t boast.