Today marks the last day of the January transfer window, although it is February now.
It is Jim White yellow tie day. It will be a manic, panic-driven day. But, it is also the second anniversary of Palace signing Joe Ledley and Scott Dann. So not all bad then.
The nature of the transfer window is that a few deals occur in the first four weeks, then it all goes nuts in the last day.
Well I am not going to predict what is going to happen today. I am going to keep my head down at work, then have a glass of something pleasant tonight because it is my birthday.
For now, I am going to look back at one of the deals that has been consummated in the last month. It is not a Palace deal either. The deal I want to look at happened at roughly the same time we signed Emmanuel Adebayor. And I think the Adebayor deal made Palace fans and other footie fans look the other way.
Here is my question. What on earth is Ramires doing going to China for 25 million quid?
I could go on about whether Ramires is worth £25 million.
In his defence he scored an unbelievable goal against Barcelona to get Chelsea in to the Champions League final. But he has been behind John Obi Mikkel in the pecking order of midfielders during Chelsea’s worst season for ages.
I could be patronising about football in China. I am going to side step that though. Fan Zhiyi and Sun Jihai proved many years ago that China could produce very useful players.
The chances are that China will become a huge market for football in the years and decades to come, and a place where global stars might want to play out their final years. But that theory does not work in this case.
Ramires is too young to be playing out his final years and not famous enough for people to start paying attention to Chinese football. The point I do want to make is that it looks like a really good deal for Chelsea. They have received a huge fee for a peripheral player. And for fee that no club in the Premier League – the richest league in the world remember – would have gone anywhere near paying.
It looks too good to be true.
So maybe it is.
Time for a little investigation then. In the interests of protecting the site from a legal cyber attack, I will try to stick to well-known facts.
Here goes:
- On the same day Ramires went to China, his fellow Brazilian international Pato, signed on loan for Chelsea;
- Ramires and Pato share the same agent;
- When Ramires originally signed for Chelsea from Benfica, it was understood that the player was subject to a “third party ownership” agreement, which was permitted at the time;
- So the fee Chelsea paid for Ramires did not go entirely to Benfica, but was shared between Benfica and the agent;
- Pato has struggled with injuries and loss of form since impressing early in his career in Italy; he has recently been playing in Brazil where player salaries are much lower than Europe
That is the end of the facts bit. Now here goes with a ridiculous comparison to emphasise my point.
Imagine this is January 2015 and I am an agent who has befriended Vincent Tan, owner of Cardiff City. Among the players I look after are Stuart O’Keefe and Kenwyne Jones.
I convince Tan to pay £10 million for O’Keefe, and Tan agrees provided Palace agree to take Kenwyne on loan.
When that deal is announced, because it is Palace and Cardiff, it is mocked by all and sundry and I am brought before the Premier League, the police and Derren Brown so that they can understand how on earth I managed to pull the wool over Tan’s eyes.
The comparison may be slightly daft.
Chelsea can argue that they are simply part of a global market and received an offer for Ramires they could not refuse. And in these days of Financial Fair Play getting income like that certainly helps balance the books.
But I am not convinced this is a true market deal. In a past life I was in a job where I had to understand the nature of money laundering transactions. One of the criteria used in that money laundering training covered transactions apparently above market price.
The theory was that money launderers are happy to exchange £100 of their ill-gotten assets for £50 of clean money.
There are money laundering rules in football too these days and I am not doubting that the source of the funds Chelsea received is genuine.
The club that bought Ramires is owned by the largest electrical retailer in China. I would imagine that selling electrical products to a nation with a huge population of young aspirational intelligent people is pretty profitable. So the source of the money is not a problem.
It is just that Chelsea seem to have got £25 million for a player worth may half that, as long as they were happy to have Pato chatting with Asmir Begovic, Baba Rahman, Loic Remy and Rubén Loftus-Cheek on the Chelsea bench.
And we never managed to get that £10 million for Stuart O’Keefe …
