HARD BARGAINING TACTICS IN THE

FOOTBALL INDUSTRY
Introduction
The sports industry, especially football is a very valuable industry in Europe and more so in
the United Kingdom. The focus of this article will be the Premier League (PL), which is the
highest league in English football and is among the top leagues in Europe, if not the best
league in Europe. The greatest revenue in the PL is not through match day tickets or other
footballing activities but through TV and broadcasting rights revenue. More than this,
arguably the most fascinating aspect of Club football is transfers, in particular when they are
multi-million pound transfers. Though these lucrative deals are the end product we see in
news outlets, they are the culmination of long and drawn out negotiations. These
negotiations are not as straight forward as they seem and in some extreme cases may involve
up to 6 negotiators in a single transfer deal.
Invariably, when you have so many parties involved in a multi-million pound deal, there is
every bit of chance for parties to use hard bargaining tactics, to claim more value at the table
or if they are kind enough, create more value. Here, we look at three common hard bargaining
tactics in the PL after we understand the history of such deals
History of these deals
Prior to the creation of the PL, The top English league was “The First Division” in which there
were not many foreign players involved and from a tactical point of view of the game, football
wasn’t as beautiful as it is today. This meant transfers between teams were mostly within the
UK and the price paid by a club for the services of a player were a fraction of what we see
today. Besides, as there was no social media and not many companies, there were not many
endorsement deals for the players and the players lived a simpler life where they didn’t need
agents to represent them.
In 1992, the PL was created with the help of the investment from major TV broadcasters at
the time, which meant that the PL was being shown to millions of people in the UK and
overseas. This effectively increased viewership and hence, the overall value of the league.
This also meant that players got better exposure and they could be used as marketable assets.
This led companies to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds and sometimes millions to the
players in exchange for their appearances to promote their products. This created a snowball
effect where more revenues led to more foreign players (as well as domestic players of
course) to want to play in the PL because of the higher wages (due to the lucrative TV deals),
which in turn led to even more revenues – Thus creating a money making machine in the PL.
This unprecedented demand meant teams had to pay a premium on PL players to get them
to leave their teams in the PL because of the lack of revenue streams in the other leagues.
Now, we shall look at some of the hard bargaining tactics used by agents (negotiators) in
major transfer agreements and why they use that particular tactic and how it works.
1. Stalling (or rather “over-stalling”)
Stalling is an age old tactic used in negotiations to squeeze out every possible cent out of
a deal. The principle behind is that when a party A has something, party B wants and is
willing to pay for it and party A stalls without agreeing to the deal, it makes party B more
desperate and makes party B pay more for it in a bid to get it.
This is common in football as there is a fixed period of the year called the transfer window
(happens twice a year), where deals can be finalised. This means if a team has a player
another team wants, they may stall till very close to the transfer deadline just to make the
other team desperate enough to pay more.
Another reason for stalling is because it creates demand. Sometimes clubs when they
receive offers for a player and they stall, they may choose to make the offer public or leak
to the press to be reported (the second one is rather underhanded, but still is used by
elite clubs in Spain). This gives exposure to the player and more clubs may arrive with
bigger bids to secure the player’s services, thus creating a bidding war and driving up the
transfer price.
2. Red Herring
This tactic is usually visible in the final stages of a deal. A transfer essentially is a deal
between the buying and the selling club and a deal between the player and the buying
club. Sometimes, experienced agents begin with bonuses and add-on fees of a deal, or in
case of a player, the performance related bonuses, loyalty bonuses etc. This ends up
eating too much of the time and finally they bring up the upfront fee or the basic wages,
which actually end up making the chunk of the value of the deal. This makes the other
party accept those terms without much negotiations as there is a transfer deadline.
Amateur and less powerful agents fall for it most of the time because there is a deadline
and a deal has to be agreed upon.
3. Extreme Anchoring
This tactic is used commonly as well. When team B asks team A about a player, team A
could quote a ludicrous amount of money. Sadly sometimes, the other team (team B here)
ends up paying it.
This kind of anchoring could mean that the other party (team B) walks away from the deal,
but depending on the analysis done by the quoting, it could well be a calculated risk. For
example, if the other team (team B) is short on players in that position and has had a
nightmare season in the previous campaign, team A knows that they are utterly desperate
and to please the board and the fans, they might just pay any quoted value. But this
analysis has to be done beforehand in order to successfully execute it.