The theory before the summer transfer window opened
was that player exchanges would provide a way for hard-up clubs to make signings without
spending heavily.
In reality, though, very few swap deals, with or without any additional money, actually
took place, either during this window or any other.
But why? How come swap deals are rare?
“I’ve made suggestions about (swap deals) loads of times,” a leading agent told The
Athletic. “But the reality is that they’re too complicated and involve too many variables.
If you’ve got two players on £40,000 a week with a year left (on their contracts),
you’d think, ‘This is simple’, but it’s not if one of them is 28 years old and one
is 22. Every player has an individual asset value.”
Straight swaps, as was the case with that Alexis Sanchez-Henrikh Mkhitaryan deal, are
unusual, not least because it is unlikely that two clubs will deem that the players
involved are worth exactly the same amount.
The background to how Arsenal and Manchester United found common ground with Sanchez and
Mkhitaryan is fascinating and was explained by Dick Law, who was Arsenal’s chief negotiator
for over a decade. And the American stresses the importance of trust.
“In that same window”, he remembers, “three players moved (in a connected transfer).”
He is talking about a three-way deal that involved Olivier Giroud, Michy Batshuayi and
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Giroud was moving from Arsenal to Chelsea, Batshuayi from Chelsea
to Borussia Dortmund (on loan), and Aubameyang from Dortmund to Arsenal. Each deal needed
to go through, or one of the clubs could have ended up with two of the three players and
another with none.
“There are certain clubs I just wouldn’t trust at all, but when I called Marina Granovskaia,
I said, ‘For this thing to happen, I need your word that you’re going to sign Giroud’.
And Marina said, ‘Yes, we’re going to sign Giroud if we can offload Batshuayi’.
So, I called Sven Mislintat to get an absolute assurance that if they were able to offload
Aubameyang, they were going to sign Batshuayi.
When Mislintat confirmed, Law called Granovskaia back and outlined the way forward.
That deal happened, of course, but it was an unusual situation in which everything went
right. More often, even if no money changes hands between clubs as part of a swap deal,
the contrasting values of players can cause all sorts of complications.
There are often sell-on clauses to calculate, levies which are payable to the league on
domestic deals, solidarity payments to be made on international transfers and training
compensation to consider, too. It’s very difficult to find two players of – genuinely
– equal worth, or a situation which suits two clubs evenly.
Or two players, even. It’s not uncommon for a player to feel as though they are being
persuaded, or even pushed, to join another club slightly against their will.
Stephen Ireland had his doubts about leaving Manchester City for Aston Villa as part of
the deal that took James Milner in the other direction. Ireland worried he was making a
mistake even when he was signing the paperwork — at one point, he asked if he could step
outside and speak to his agent in private. In the end, Ireland went ahead with the move
against his better judgment.
Listening to players who have been involved in swap deals, you get the impression they
are often the last to find out that they are about to be on the move and generally know
little about how the talks started.
Keith Gillespie, however, heard straight from the horse’s mouth when, in 1995, Sir Alex
Ferguson pulled him aside after a game against Sheffield United to tell him that a deal with
Newcastle for Andy Cole could only be completed if he moved to St James’ Park. Gillespie
was 19 years old and did not have an agent at the time, so Ferguson offered to negotiate
his Newcastle deal for him and more than quadrupled his salary in the process.
But back to the deals that don’t happen.
“First of all, it comes down to valuation of players” Law says.
“Then you get into the issue of whether the players want to move Sanchez was willing
to go to United and Mkhitaryan wanted to go to Arsenal, and that’s why it worked. The
third issue would have been the player negotiations and agents’ commissions.”
The fact that the players were not dissimilar in age and profile helped, plus they would
both be staying in the Premier League. Ultimately, though, the deal was driven by United’s
long-standing desire to acquire Sanchez, and that played into the hands of Mkhitaryan’s
agent, Mino Raiola, who knew his client could make or break the transfer.
As swap deals go, this one was off the scale financially. According to contract information
obtained and published by the German magazine Der Spiegel, Sanchez ended up earning £391,000
a week at United and picked up a £6.7 million signing on fee, while Mkhitaryan’s basic
wage at Arsenal was £144,000 a week and there was an £8.5 million loyalty bonus on top,
not including the agent fee.
On the pitch, Sanchez was a disaster in Manchester, and Mkhitaryan’s time in London would prove
very forgettable.e. In fact, within 18 months of those January moves, both players were
out on loan elsewhere.
And that’s probably another reason why swap deals are not particularly common: Beyond
the logistical difficulties and the need for perfect alignment and timing, there just aren’t
many examples of them being a success.