Only a handful of transfer deals in the Championship this summer have their fees confirmed and Stoke City haven’t announced the price they have paid for anyone since signing Liam Lindsay
It is 23 senior signings in a row over five years and counting that Stoke City have made when they have paid what has been described as an undisclosed fee.
That is 23 senior signings in row since they brought in Liam Lindsay from Barnsley in the summer of 2019 and confirmed that was for a fee of £2 million. Barnsley had argued that the fee should have been reported as undisclosed and it affected their negotiations with Brentford over Lindsay’s centre-half partner Ethan Pinnock, who soon left for London for an undisclosed fee reported to be about £3m.
Stoke were taken to court and the case was held virtually during lockdown – and Stoke won. But still, all the deals that have followed from Tommy Smith and Jordan Thompson to Viktor Johansson and Eric Bocat have been for undisclosed fees.
And so have pretty much been every other transfer in the Championship. This summer only Idris El Mizouni (Ipswich Town to Oxford United, £400,000) and Torbjorn Heggem (IF Brommapojkarna to West Brom, £500,000) have been transparent.
Leading football finance expert Kieran Maguire said on thePrice of Football Podcast:”In terms of individual deals, let’s say people believe you have a budget of £50m this summer and you go and sign a player for £40m, selling clubs know that you’ve not got a lot of money left.
“So by keeping the fees undisclosed, you create a bit of uncertainty. I know practically all of Brighton’s deals are for undisclosed fees. We are owned by a poker player, and he will say, ‘never reveal anything of your hand’. And that’s why we see so many individual deals for undisclosed fees.
“Nobody is entitled to know what you and I earn because that is private information. In the same way, these are private limited companies and therefore they can argue that in terms of individual transactions, ‘we’re not going to give anything away’.
“It’s the same as individual wage packages, they don’t give anything away. Where there is a statutory obligation, for example, to disclose the total amount of money paid in wages, that’s when the club will show it. Similarly, clubs are obliged to show the total amount paid for transfer fees in a financial year in their yearly accounts.
“It’s simply a case that there is no legal obligation to show things on a forensic or granular level in terms of individual purchases or sales. Sometimes they might choose to do it. That can often be in an attempt to send out a message, maybe to the fanbase – like, ‘look at us, we’ve just spent X amount of millions on this player’. But most of the time they would rather keep it closer to their chest.”