Loaning out players with an obligation to purchase at the end of the term is all the rage at the moment. It is a transfer dressed up as a loan deal. You loan out the player, but you know that you will sell him.
It all began with the increasingly exhaustive monitoring of the markets by bodies such as FIFA and the LFP. So-called Financial Fair Play controls the balances of clubs throughout Europe, requiring them to follow rules which often end up dashing their hopes in the transfer market.
Faced with these complications, clubs have to reinvent the wheel every summer. To minimise the effect of these limitations, recently there has been a rise in the number of loan deals with a compulsory purchase clause.
Under this scheme, a player who moves from one club to another needs to recoup the proportional part of his cost in each season that he signs for. In other words, a four-season deal for 60 million euros would be the equivalent of the purchasing club paying 15 million euros for each year. Under a loan, the margin for that season can be better structured, although their wages may suffer in the following seasons.
A number of players have already moved clubs under this arrangement, including Iago Aspas from Liverpool to Sevilla; Shaquiri, who moved from Bayern to Inter Milan; and Mauricio, who went from Sporting Lisbon to Lazio under this sort of deal. The first player to make such a move was Ibrahimovic, when Barça included this clause in his move to Milan. However, the most renowned case involves Valencia.
Negredo moved there from Manchester City. Although he did not have a brilliant first season, this summer the club was forced to shell out 30 million euros for the striker. Following his poor performance, the Spaniard will almost definitely be relegated to warming the bench every week.
