Finding success as a selling club

A selling club is a club that has to sell its most prized assets every season to survive, they don’t generate a lot of money from marketing, sponsorships and merchandise. There are a lot of soccer clubs in Europe even if they play in the lucrative Champions League they still have to sell season in, season out for them to keep afloat and not be in debt or go down under a lot of debt like Leeds United, remember them? Now stuck in the third tier of English football.

Many clubs have tried to sell stars but have never really recovered thereafter. If the stars leave, the glory years go with them. Two such clubs are Ajax Amsterdam and PSV Eindhoven. Ajax Amsterdam have never been the same since Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Juventus), Rafael van der Vaart and Nigel de Jong (Hamburger SV) left. Six others (Hatem Trabelsi, Tomáš Galásek, Hans Vonk, Nourdin Boukhari, Steven Pienaar and Maxwell) left the following year.

Ajax have never returned to the heights of winning two Dutch league titles and a Champions League quaterfinal exit at the hands of AC Milan — the eventual champions. And PSV Eindhoven have had their troubles too since losing influential players like Mark van Bommel, Johann Vogel, Ji Sung Park, Lee Young-Pyo and Wilfred Bouma. They won the league last year by a whisker and this year finished fourth. The story of how to sell and still be competitive every season has been re-written by FC Porto.

FC Porto have managed to survive against all odds even though they have had to sell players every season to survive and also finance loans and interest payments on their stadium — Estádio do Dragão — the Dragon Stadium. They have sold their best players to some of the biggest clubs in Europe but still manage to go beyond the group stages of the Champions League every season. They have won the Portuguese league seven times this decade and totally dominated it for the past four seasons since 2005. Since Mourinho launched them to Champions League success in the 2003-2004 season, they have managed to make close to €300 million from the sale of players. They have sold some of the top players in the world right now: Anderson (€30 millio) to Manchester United, Paulo Ferreira, Jose Bosingwa and Ricardo Carvalho (combined fee close to €100 million) to Chelsea and Ricardo Quaresma (€19 million) to Inter Milan. Their selling policy continued this season with the sale of last season’s top stars like: Lisandro Lopez and Aly Cissokho (combined fee of €39 million) to Lyon. Last season’s title-winning captain and Argentinian midfielder Lucho Gonzalez (€18 million) was shipped to Marseille.

So, one would ask how do they do it when they lose their best players every season? Teams are built not to rely on one player, like Milan when they relied on Kaka. No matter how important the player is, they are still replaceable. The club’s best trick is to pick unknown players from around the world, especially South America, and then sell them a few years later for astronomical fees to some of the bigger clubs. They have also established a good scouting network, which is always busy bringing players across the Atlantic from leagues in South America. They also always avoid a situation where a player doesn’t settle and then they lose a lot of money on him (like Manchester United did with Kleberson a few years back).

Most of the players in South America are owned by agencies, so the clubs pay the agency and get percentage rights. If the player settles, well then they buy all the rights and after another year or two in the Portuguese league they are sold to bigger clubs if they don’t they sell their rights back to the agency.

FC Porto remain one of the best supported clubs around with an average attendance of 38 000 — the highest in Portugal. The Porto success story continues to be criticised in many quarters but they continue to unearth a lot of talent, pay off their debts and not have an over-inflated wage bill like some smaller clubs in the English Premier League. They also keep on attracting talent because their immigration laws are not as draconian as the British and they also offer Champions League football every season. This could be a model to follow especially with the fall of Leeds United a few years back, crumbling under huge debts they couldn’t service.