Colin Gordon likens football’s burgeoning loan system to lazy housekeeping. “It’s an excellent way of hiding your mess by sweeping it beneath the carpet,” says the former leading agent.
“Loans can be vitally important in enabling young players to learn their trade but, all too often, they simply enable people to disguise their recruitment mistakes. A lot of clubs fail to perform proper due diligence on signings and quickly discover they don’t want them but are then unable to get their money back. They use loans as a mat to hide bad buys under.”
At the last count 168 Premier League players were out on such secondments, with Chelsea dispatching 38 across eight countries, Manchester City sending 17 on temporary placements and Liverpool and West Ham releasing 12 apiece into the game’s equivalent of foster care.
Serial loanees are a growing phenomenon of which Chelsea’s Patrick Bamford appears at the vanguard. Embarking on his sixth stint away from Stamford Bridge – at Burnley this time – the striker’s morale is boosted by maintaining close social media ties with his fellow 37 members of this west London diaspora. “The loan department set up a special WhatsApp group for us,” Bamford says. “Sometimes it drains your phone’s battery when everyone’s messaging each other.”
Although teams doing the borrowing sometimes pay a loan fee to the parent club, Gordon says it is very rare for them to contribute more than 50% of a player’s wages. To all intents paying someone to work for another company would be unthinkable in business but proves commonplace throughout football.
Yet if Sunderland have clearly lost heavily on Jeremain Lens – the Holland winger signed from Dynamo Kyiv for £8.5m last summer and now borrowed by Fenerbahce after failing to establish himself on Wearside – things are arguably sometimes a little different for the Chelseas and Citys of this world.
While both clubs do seem to be hoarding an inordinate number of potential talents in increasingly overblown “development squads”, playing the loan system cleverly could furnish them with decent profits. For instance, if and when it is decided Bamford will never make Antonio Conte’s first team, Chelsea are likely to recoup considerably more than the £1.5m they paid Nottingham Forest for his attacking ability.
Ostensibly it seems ridiculous that clubs who can register no more than 25 professionals for Premier League combat are, in some cases, stockpiling more than double that number, but Chelsea will not complain about the tidy income from all those loan fees.
The most lucrative is almost certainly yielded from Juan Cuadrado. After joining for £23.3m last year, the Colombia forward, who would probably not be recognised by some members of staff at his parent club’s Cobham training base, was relocated to Juventus, where he has returned on a three-year loan for an annual fee of £4.25m. At the end of that period, Juve have an option to buy him permanently for a final instalment, potentially rising to almost £12m.
Chelsea maintain they are primarily seeking to develop diamonds. “We don’t send players out because we’re trying to recover money,” Michael Emenalo, the club’s technical director, has said. “We want them to play and develop.”
Thibaut Courtois is the poster boy for this philosophy. Bought for £5m from Genk in 2011 and immediately housed at Atlético Madrid for three seasons, the Belgium goalkeeper eventually broke into Chelsea’s team with spectacular success.
There are similarly high hopes for Lewis Baker, a two-footed England Under-21 midfielder presently borrowed by Vitesse, a feeder club for Conte’s squad. That partnership was forged in 2010 when Merba Jordania, a Georgian businessman and friend of Roman Abramovich, Chelsea’s owner, bought Vitesse and began offering a short-term home to a series of players in addition to Andy Myers, a Stamford Bridge under-21 coach now on a two-year “sabbatical” in the Netherlands.
Christian Atsu has served his time at Vitesse – as well as at Everton, Bournemouth and Málaga – but, despite being capped 42 times by Ghana, the winger, signed for £3.5m from Porto three years ago, is still waiting for his Chelsea debut. After joining Newcastle United on loan Atsu knows it will not be any time soon.
Kenneth Omeruo is yet another in the same boat. The 22-year-old Nigeria defender has been on the books since 2012 – and remains contracted until 2019 – but is yet to appear in Chelsea’s first team. He has just completed a fourth short-term move, clocking on at the promoted Turkish club Alanyaspor. “Being a Chelsea player is great but I don’t want to be always out on loan,” he said. “Ideally every footballer wants to be settled at one club and playing regularly.”
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