It is kinda weird to talk about "running down a contract", instead of "fulfilling a contract", which is what they actually do.

Finally someone said it on a KZfaq video. The price of football players now makes it almost impossible to buy. Ever since the neymar deal players have just been running down their contracts so they can move.

Is this foreshadowing that Alfie leaving HITC at the end of his contract? If the Irish Guy is anything to go by then it’s probably a good move.

Yeah, the point you made about the taboo of running down a contract is a real thing. As a Villa fan, I was delighted to sign Kamara from Marseille - but the amount of hate he's getting from Marseille fans for not giving his boyhood club a transfer fee is massive. Which, I totally understand the Marseille fan's emotions - but he hasn't actually done anything wrong.

The HITC Sevens channel won’t survive losing Alfie on a free, just like HITC Sport failed to replace The Irish Guy. Time to leave Alfie: full control over videos, self promo and sponsorship. We’ll follow you along 👊

Can’t believe you said ‘one size fits all’ and didn’t flash up a picture of legendary defender Fitz Hall.

The Footballers get to Control their Own Narrative and get Bigger Contracts + Signing On Bonuses as Free Agents ….. ⚽️

it makes sense,from the wenger prediction back then to the high number of cases of free agents who are star players

Kane has always said he would stay at Spurs if he felt the club was 'moving forward,' he tried to move last summer and the one before where Spurs finished 6th and 7th. However, it seems like he's open to a new contract now with Conte staying and the club making top 4, I suspect its also down to minimal interest as well.

A video about invincibles who didn't win the league, there's more than you think; Galatasary, Perugia, Red Star Belgrade, Benfica

yes bigger contracts and signing bonuses, and in most cases their family members are part of their agents, so they can make 10M, 20M, 30M or more during the entire career of a player. Mbappe is only 23, but I can guarantee that his family has received over 50M Euros so far by representing him and signing twice with the PSG. 20 years ago, players signed contract and with their salary they helped financially their family members, but now they don't have to give them anything, they just become their agents.

I'm an American (like 15% of your audience and 90% of your comments... Sorry about that) who studied sports management and business. The concept of "running down contracts" is actually more recent in American sports and represents a huge shift in power from the teams to the players. Typically, teams make money regardless. After all the sport and team is what is popular, the players come and go. As an athlete in most impact and contact sports (Football, NFL, hockey, basketball, etc.) You have approximately 10-15 years in your career. So if you sign 5 year deals, you have 1 rookie deal, 1 prime deal, and 1 sunset deal. Teams often push players to sign extensions for longer deals to avoid paying full value during those prime years. Some players break the mold (Ronaldo/Messi, Tom Brady, Sidney Crosby, Lebron James) where their career will clearly last longer, and it will be almost entirely prime contract years. But for the other 99%, you have to plan your retirement before the age of 40, so contracts need to be in service of that. Fans will want the player to "do the right thing" for the team, but as a player who probably doesn't have the skills for other career paths, you need to set yourself up as much as possible. And that means, you HAVE to run those contracts down until you get the deal you want. You'll almost always make more on an open market than a one-team negotiation. And you never know when an injury ends it all. So yeah, as a fan I hate it. But if I were them, I would do the exact same thing.

Going forward, I'd imagine most players will have reasonable release clauses or run down their contract. Hopefully this will bring transfer fees back down.

A video about the success of Carol Shanahan and Port Vale since she bought the club would be good, especially since we just won the playoff final

One small point regarding American sports: Major League Baseball clubs do have to pay Japanese teams a "posting fee" when signing a player based on the size of their contract. Generally this only happens 1-2 times a season and only with the very top players.

The Bosman Law really gave the power to the players

This is really well done Alfie - as I have come to expect! I’d really like you to go back in time and cover Jim McLean and his mad 7 year contracts that he did at Dundee United back in the day - I think you’d enjoy researching it and comparing it to today’s shenanigans!

Thanks Alfie! I have been thinking about this myself for a few times. Seems to happen more often nowadays.

I really like your long videos Alfie. These documentaries are awesome

This was an amazing watch, and the last few minutes was truthful and mind blowing

Arsene Wenger said he could go a season undefeated, got mocked, and then did it anyway. It boggles the mind that people don't listen to him.

Great work Alfie as always

Day 33: Considering that the last player who played in the miracle of Bern died about 6 months ago, I would really like to see a video about the whole story between Germany and Hungary, especially because it meant so much to at least the German population

Brilliant video and timing because I was literally talking about this same issue to a friend a week ago

Can't believe Alfie has finally pronounced Lionel Messi correctly (now let's get him to say Cazorla properly pronounced)

Love the channel (and the intros). Keep it up brother. Don’t change a thing.

I enjoyed this video. Good work.

Was wondering if you knew about the plight of Bangor FC in the Welsh League? Was just reading about it and it sounds mental. Could make a good vid. Cheers for the great content 👍🏼

Excellent work Alfie.

Last 5 videos have been straight fire bro

£35m was poor from Arsenal. Cesc was a generational talent and should have been sold for no less than £50m. But this was Wenger's issue. He sold players for peanuts post 2005.

Interesting thing about the American leagues - players have no say in transfers - if a team decides to transfer them while they are under contract, they have no choice but to go to the new club

Great topic man!

The point between 31:00 and 31:15 is interesting. I would probably argue that football fans tend to consider themselves as fans of a club rather than of a particular player. A football club, to the fans, can also be viewed as an institutional thing representing their locality or their root, be it their parents' hometown, their race, their religion, their educational institute, or anything meaningful. Therefore, fans would prefer any kind of changes that are more beneficial to the clubs they support. This is probably also why many players have "childhood dream" clubs that they hope that they will play with their dream clubs one day. I am divided, honestly, whether football clubs should be run as institutions representing whatever roots or as business entities. There might be a sweet spot somewhere between both ends, probably.

Do a video on why it took so long for Forest to return to the prem

May have been long, but it was a great video

havent seen this channel for a good year or so, glad to see that you're doing longer-form, substantial pieces instead of generic top 10 (or top 7) lists. this is good stuff. you guys also made the right call in departing with the irish guy

Rugby premiership has a salary cap and works pretty well. I think they should have it in the top football leagues. Its just getting ridiculous at this point

lovely video

solution for the club- determine whether your player, especially stars, wants to stay. If not, find out where they want to go and work out a trade before their contract expires. Pretty common in America- especially when used with a holdout

Another point especially from the nba. In that league, the Miami Heat signed 3 Allstars (including possibly the best player ever) in Lebron James, Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade. All 3 had allegedly made a pact that they would all join the same team when their deals expire. Now the trend of players teaming up is common in the NBA. Maybe we see some of that for football??? Like 3 England players teaming up and signing for Real Madrid when their contracts run out

It just makes business sense for the players and the prospective team where they may move

Why shouldn’t they! They signed for x amount of years why should they have to stay beyond

With NBA and such, the difference is that they are super robust, with no promotion/relegation system. In European football it could be possible for a completely new team to go up through the ranks and enter the top tier league which would make it very tricky in that financial department.

great topics

Any chance of a video about football in the Olympics? I just don't see why it's not a big deal seeing as the Olympics is so well watched

i think it would be interesting to see more set contracts like you see in the nba. it would give players more freedom in a more open free agency and prevent scummy club contracts of ridiculously long extensions

Hey Alfie 👋 next video Idea : 7 managers who revolutionised football clubs

23:26 have a print of this framed at my house, was not expecting to see it on a football youtube video. list under odd crossovers.

Day 1: Explaining different league formats. Most are quite easy to grasp, but then I see stuff like Liga MX (congrats Atlas btw) with their apertura and clausura, or whatever the Belgians were thinking. I understand the meaning of words, but what's the idea behind those formats.

2 years ago my friend and I started to do an FM save where we place as many free agents as possible into a team a see how they perform in the Prem. The player has to be a free agent at the time of making the experiment, and a few have to be either a meme, players who are far past their best but kinda legendary, or from our home country... Just so it's not too easy.

Maybe a "What went wrong" or "what went right" series about various club takeovers (e.g. Monaco) or legendary squads and their downfall (e.g Inter)

I wish my players in FM would do it instead of asking for an improved deal every 6 months.

can you do a video on players that become great managers and vice versa so assess players that are still active that have the potential to become great managers from a sense of their ability to understand tactics and exert influence Examples James Milner, Juan Mata.

It has become more acceptable in other professions for employees to have negotiating powers against employers as well.

This development makes association football a lot more like US sports. Since transfers aren’t a thing (99 times out of 100 American sports have “trades” aka player swaps) players are either traded or signed in free agency. So footballers running down their contracts makes them a lot more like US athletes and give them more leverage. Edit: Alfie literally said this same exact thing LOL

One idea from the NBA is sign and trade deals, where the player gets a new contract and the club gets a different player to replace the leaving player.

I think if you played league 1 or 2 and someone waved 5 to 6 years in your face you are biting their hand off. You want long term job security, when you are a great player in the top leagues you can easily afford to run down a contract and play hard ball.

We call it testing the market in the USA sports leagues. I think it supports what you're saying perfectly about "running down the contract" and its negative implications.

Best German players in the premier league of all time. (Day 329) I will not give up until the video is made or Alfie himself tells me to stop. Everyone else telling me that will be ignored. If you don't believe my number, just go back to the previous videos. I'm at the bottom most of the time, but I'm there.

I haven’t finished the vid yet so maybe you talk about this, but my sense is that with the rate of player valuations going up, it’s reaching a bit of a ceiling. If grealish is worth £100m, who can afford whatever Salah is really worth (plus like you say, the large amount he and his agent will want to be paid).

There's also little talk that elsewhere, the one place where clubs could make a fortune fairly quickly is going away by virtue of clubs avoiding paying fees. The fees, by virtue of FIFA's rulesets and what have to be enforced by a number of CAS decisions elsewhere, are what keeps many clubs afloat elsewhere within their own country's pyramids or just as an institution outside of the pyramid by virtue of solidarity and training compensation payments. For as few players from academies that have modestly successful football careers, few are like Wesley Sneijder in this regard. The question is what happens to the rest of football as the institution as it is if the concentrated economic landscapes outside of the sport continue and financiers (and those without ties to producing actual things that generate wealth) continue to dominate the economic landscapes far away with less industrialization and less sustainment of competition in those arenas?

It is the norm in league 1 and 2 in england. Clubs are refusing to sell with 2 years left on their contract when they are find the offers coming up short. Eventhough the transfer value is dropping from that point.

Players subcontracting their services as private entities to clubs rather than being employed by clubs directly is certainly something I could see happening, as it could open all kinds of tax/benefit loopholes for them. I've got first hand experience of some professional sportspeople here in New Zealand attempting that very same trick, with mixed results/response

Kinda of an American shot if you think about it. These guys see Americans walking after fulfilling their contracts and getting PAID. Instead of one club being able to afford that transfer fee now you have 5 teams that can afford your contract and get into a bidding war. Seems great for the player. F the club, they ain't loyal either For the record I made this comment before end of video

Could you do a video explaining all those different Uefa Competions, like the Intertoto Cup, Cup Winners Cup, Fairs Cup and any others you find. I don't really understand them and I thought who better to explain them than you

Cheers from the states 🇺🇸

AC Monza who you made a video on not too long ago have been promoted now

I wouldn’t pay Ramsey over 100k per week. Juve is making the same mistakes Barcelona made.

Day 468: Ways to fix VAR with your suggestions

I never understood why football didn’t have free agency like the American sports because it means that wages can be regulated but I guess it’s a bigger headache to legislate that over a whole continent but if they did things like FFP wouldn’t be needed however more money would need to be put into the ladder in other ways

Because for the Top players, transfer fees are mental so only way to get a move is run contract down. In future you will see bets players signing max 3 year deal. Players also can ask for large signing on fees due to no transfer fee involved or a higher wage.

Video idea - each clubs 7 best players of the premier league era (or maybe jus the big six cus it might be quite long)

Day 8 - The Fall and Rise of FK Velež Mostar From a Club that has beaten Borussia Dortmund, Twente, Derby County and many others to a club that was forced from their own stadium, reduced to nothing during the Bosnian War, becoming a mediocre top-level team in the 00s to nearly being forced into folding in 2016 to its amazing rise back to the top-level football which culminated in return to Europe after 33 years which has seen elimination of Coleraine before a suprising win over AEK Athens before exiting 3rd Round against Elfsborg IF and recently continuing in the Cup win this season which has ensured another European summer next season

For a second I thought I heard Kane's agent was on charlie and it still made sense to me.

in Australian Rugby League, the only way to escape your contract without completing it is to get sacked or to do a swap deal but even then it's only in the final year.

Please do a video on Türkgücü München.The club was founded in Germany by Turkish Immigrants in the 70s and after making it's way to the 3rd division the club filed for bankruptcy.The club recently withdrew from the league.Most German football fans hate as far as I can see.A quick look through the Google reviews is all that's needed.

its impossible to get a transfer with a good wage bill because of how expensive transfers have become. its very hard for a club to keep up with ffp, sign other players and fufill the wage demands of the player. its really hard to hit all 3, so its easier to just wait it out and players can reliably expect higher wages as they are more in demand and the club does not need to pay transfer fees this problem is only going to go away if transfer fees go down.

Video Request-What On Earth Is Going On At Saint-Etienne? The Club Was Relegated Along With Bordeaux And Metz From Ligue 1 And After Their Relegation, Fans Started A Riot Against The Players At The Stadium

Video Request-Top 10 Big Football Clubs That Have Been Relegated

Transfer fees are ridiculous, more and more players' are gonna ask for release clauses now

In the U.S we call this Free agency, where the players finish their contract and sell their services to the highest bidder, although most free agents are towards the end of their careers in U.S sports, the teams love free agents because there's no trade/transfer fee and they don't have to sacrifice giving away other players.

Since you're talking about Americanizing football: Luxury tax is one solution for both salary and total transfer amounts (transfer + all other payments related to the transfer). Bonuses paid throughout the season will be added to the clubs' "taxable" salary expenditure for next season. You can set it at 25% to be distributed to clubs that didn't go over the caps & proportionally from lowest to highest spender. This way the scumbag owners of city, psg & newcastle can still spend but there is an additional cost them but benefit to smaller clubs. FFP remains of course and the luxury tax is not exempt as either salary or transfer expense.

This channel is great, but never misses a chance to insult Spurs.

Ramsey wanted to stay at Arsenal btw, it was Unai Emery who was against it, and thus the contract renewal was not offered

Here's an alternative view on this whole contract running down topic; Look at it from the club's point of view. If you bought a player, gave him a substantial contract, after already paying a substantial amount to aquire him, you'd definitely look to gain back some of that transfer fee, regardless of the player performance. And, clubs usually build teams on project basis, so if a player wants to be part of that project, they have to commit there and then. If you wait for the end of your contract, then decide if you want to stay, the club may not want to put itself at risk of not having you in their plans, and since you as a player didnt accept a new deal before this, they can just move forward and sign another player to ensure the project is ongoing. Not to sound cliche, but the club is always bigger than the player. And lets be brutally honest, being tied down with a 100k a week contract for 2 years is nothing short of a luxury, you cant spin it around as if you are being held hostage and working for 20cents an hour in a refugee camp.

My second favourite sport is the NFL( technically a league). Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens is letting his team happy rookie contract contract expire. Has no agent. Hope he wins

This is all depending on the attitude of the footballer who is running down his contract. If he's playing hard to the end of his contract good for him if you're just collecting wages until the next best thing comes in then as a club you should ask for a transfers fee.

Day 267: Indonesia XI If All Eligible Players Had Declared For Them.

Alfie, slight correction for your video. Totally understandable mistake from a British guy talking about American sport. In regards to transfer fees, it depends on the league. Many leagues will allow a team to trade cash for a player. Baseball has a system for players who play professionally in other countries like Japan or Korea. The Japanese or Korean team will post the player as being available. At that point every Major League Baseball team interested will submit a bid on the player. The highest bidder gets the rights to that player and the MLB team pays that fee to the Japanese or Korean team directly, not the league paying the team. At that point, the MLB team negotiates with the player regarding their contract. Edit: Also, you had it backwards. The league is actually the subsidiary of the teams. For instance, the Commissioner of every American sport is actually hired and can be fired by the team owners. Each team is an independent franchise operating within the league brand and framework. The owners control everything, including who can be a new owner. When a team is sold to another owner, the rest of the league has to vote to approve the sale.

With explosive growth of contracts, for the top elite athletes, it's almost always more rewarding to wait as late as possible

Would it make sense for clubs to offer release clauses when extending a contract. Even taking a low fee is still better than getting nothing. If Liverpool had to offer a relatively low release clause for Salah, say 20 - 30 million, way less than he's worth, it would offer some flexibility in the sense of him knowing that it isn't going to be that difficult to get a top club to pay that. It might not be great for Liverpool to lose Salah for 20 million, but that's better tham losing him for nothing, and on top of that they keep him playing for them, even if only for a little longer.

As an American, I’ve wondered why it didn’t happen sooner. Why let your old team get a fee when you can get perhaps not the entire fee, but a significant portion of it for yourself?

How this video lasted 34 min is more shocking than Mbappe turning down Real Madrid...

This is the fact of life in American sports. And in Football it’s the result of the overvaluation of players and financial FairPlay capping Plastic clubs, free agency happens. And it gives more power to players who now will have. Ore than 2 or 3 clubs to sign with if they aren’t happy as a super club.

Whenever I hear sports fans get legitimately angry about a player leaving their favorite team, I imagine they take the same energy to their favorite restaurant when one of their best chefs leaves for a different restaurant.

I have a lot of respect for Harry Kane, because made a pretty smart choice. Sure, in hindsight he could have gotten more with a short contract and a cash-in later on, but a) any injury or drop of form completely destroys his potential and b) the value of money does not increase in a linear fashion. After fees and taxes he's probably set up with 30 mill. Unless you're a disney villain, that's far more than enough for any lifetime. The chance of getting twice as much will not change your standard of living, but the chance of getting only 20% of it due to an injury that might make the rest of your life less comfortable will change it.

It is happening more and more for sure, there’s too much player power now but before the bosman there was too much club power & the players had little. Although I will say a player signs for however long if they fulfil the length of that contract then they’ve not done anything wrong.

Ok everything has both sides, but still players who might let their club earn something on mutual agreetment and choose to not do so are doing bad for club. Few deals like that in a row might ruin the club, who let's say brought several youth talents up to shine and lost them for nothing...

i’m a jets fan and was shocked to see my team catching a stray near the end of this video