Most football fans get annoyed when their club signs or sells a player with an undisclosed fee. But by looking at some of the transfers of the summer, the majority of them involve undisclosed fees. So why do so many clubs insist on not disclosing the true figure of the transfer, especially as they must know it angers the clubs fans…

If you weren’t already aware, when a player leaves a club for an undisclosed fee, it simply means that the transfer fee will not be made public by either party (this is the agreement anyway). So for whatever reason the 2 clubs have, or perhaps the player and the agent have, they don’t want anyone to know how much money a player has been sold or brought for.

There are several, pretty straight-forward answers to why the transfer fee may be undisclosed. The main reason is that the buying club doesn’t want anyone to know how much they have just spent on a player. Perhaps this is because they don’t want to be subjected to extra pressure from the fans or media – they may have spent a large figure on an unknown player, and they don’t want to have the clubs fans on the player (or the manager’s) back from day one. By making the transfer fee undisclosed, no-one knows exactly how much money the club may have wasted on their new signing.

It seems that the majority of undisclosed fees occur in transfers in the Premiership, and this may be because the pressure is so much greater in that league, muchly due to the input of the media and the club fans. Managers don’t want to put too much pressure on their new signing by allowing everyone to know the exact transfer fee involved, especially considering the Premier League is seen as one of the hardest Leagues to adapt to. The player could do without that added pressure, and if the manager is new or worried about the status of his job then he may be shooting himself in the foot by disclosing the fee.

Another obvious reason that the transfer fee may be undisclosed is that the club which is selling may again be worried by the media and fans reaction to the fact that they have just sold a player for £1 million when they paid £4 million for him just 2 seasons ago. The media would jump on the bad-business made by the club, and so would the fans of that club, who have just seen their team waste £3 million. The club would therefore rather make the transfer fee undisclosed, so that no-one else knows how much money they mave have lost.

Sometimes this can work both ways. For example, a club may be delighted with their latest signing, who they feel they have signed on a very low price. However, the club selling may choose not to make the fee public, due to making a loss on that player. Although the buying club would have loved to make the figure public (so that the fans and media know that they had just done an excellent bit of business), the selling club may insist that the deal only goes through if the fee is undisclosed. This would obviously upset the buying club, but as that was made part of the deal then the buying club will have to follow-suit, or risk the transfer collapsing. Usually a few weeks down-the-line the transfer fee will be mysteriously leaked to the press by the buying club, although this could ruin the relationship between those two clubs.

Occasionally, and very rarely in today’s market, clubs will actually make the transfer fee public (i.e. not make it undisclosed). This is when the selling club and the buying club are both very happy with the deal that has just gone through. The buying club will feel that have signed an ace player at an excellent price, while the selling club will feel that they have received a top fee for one of their lower-quality players.

If you look at the recent transfer of Robbie Keane from Tottenham Hotspur to Liverpool, the fee of that move was a massive £19 million. In some people’s mind this was a huge figure, considering Keane is 28 years old, and that strikers usually start to peak at around this age. The majority of people feel that Keane was over-priced, but no-doubt Tottenham wanted to disclose this figure because they will see it as excellent business, and will want the fans to know exactly how much they received for the deal. Keane was seen as a star player by many Spurs fans, so if the fee was undisclosed then they may have angered many fans who would have been worried that he had been sold on the cheap. Liverpool may have been forced by Spurs to disclose the transfer fee, or risk the transfer not going through. Liverpool were probably desperate to sign Keane, and so were happy to do so (and maybe at the same time they could show fans and the media that they mean business this season).

It does appear that the undisclosed fee has become such a popular term in todays football game, and perhaps this is because players and clubs are now under so much pressure to perform. By making transfers undisclosed they are able to partly hide the transfer fee from the public, although the media do often manage to find out the true figure in the end. As annoying as it may be to the football fans, it seems that the undisclosed fee will remain to be a very common occurrence in transfer dealings around the world.

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