Daniel Levy probably needs to stop offering transfer add-ons based on ‘difficult objectives’ like Spurs winning the Premier League or Champions League.
Some clubs go all Football Manager with transfer clauses. Spurs are trying to find West Ham’s sweet spot over Mohammed Kudus but an apparent add-on regarding Thomas Frank’s side winning the Premier League and Champions League, as reported by talkSPORT, is unlikely to move things along.
That is not the first transfer clause that a prospective selling club has rejected out of hand. Spurs themselves have previous.
Bruno Fernandes – Sporting to SpursWest Ham are said to want ‘a more realistic proposal’ for Kudus which guarantees them a greater pay-out up front.
At least Spurs are not now in the midst of a famous trophy drought when pledging payments to clubs in the event they win the Premier League and Champions League.
They had just lost the Champions League final when Bruno Fernandes agreed to make the move to north London – but in echoes of the Viktor Gyokeres carry-on, Sporting president Frederico Varandas stood in the way.
“The only serious offer was from Tottenham and that was £40m plus another £18m in bonuses for winning the Premier League and the Champions League,” he said. “Those are difficult objectives, so we chose not to accept.”
By January, Manchester United came around waving an initial £47m rising to £67.7m at the Portuguese club, who were more amenable to clauses such as Champions League qualification and making 25 starts.
Declan Rice – West Ham to ArsenalWest Ham do not tend to mess around with the old Premier League and Champions League-winning clauses either.
Their laborious staring contest with Arsenal over a move everyone knew would go through involved half-hearted Manchester City hijacks and incessant grumbling over payment structures.
The Gunners had a couple of offers rejected, with one including add-ons for winning either of the two big ones and Rice playing a certain percentage of games.
In the end the £5m add-ons attached to a £100m deal were for the Hammers to receive £1m each time Arsenal simply qualified for the Champions League with Rice starting 60% of games.
Two payments down, three to go.
Sadio Mane – Liverpool to Bayern MunichWhile the perennial German champions did eventually get their man, it took a bit more finesse than one might expect.
Mane wanted the move for a fresh challenge and Liverpool were happy to oblige in a continued restructuring of their attack, but Bayern had to get serious first.
After an opening offer of £21m plus an extra £4m in add-ons was scoffed at by Liverpool, Bayern came back to the table with, as reported by the well-connected Paul Joyce of The Times, a bid which could theoretically reach £30m.
Fair enough. That seems like a perfectly sensible progression in negotiations.
Oh hold on. It would have only hit that top figure if Bayern won the Champions League and Mane the Ballon d’Or. Over each season of his three-year contract. So an extra £6.5m in return for Mane becoming the third player to win three consecutive Ballons d’Or simultaneously with Bayern completing only the second Champions League threepeat in history. Sounds about right.
Mane only ended up staying in Bavaria for a single year, with Bayern eliminated in the Champions League quarter-finals as the Senegalese struggled. No wonder Liverpool mocked those ‘laughable’ bonuses.
Aaron Wan-Bissaka – Crystal Palace to Man UtdThere were a couple of clauses contained within the final deal which saw Wan-Bissaka leave Crystal Palace for Man Utd.
The former likely abandoned any hope of receiving 10% of any subsequent sale of the right-back for more than £50m long before he moved to West Ham for £15m.
More plausible is that 190 appearances for Man Utd supplemented that initial £45m fee with £5m worth of add-ons.
But Man Utd would have had other contingencies written into the transfer if things had gone their way. It was reported during protracted negotiations that Palace were ‘unimpressed’ by the nature of the performance-related clauses, one of which was known to be an additional payment if Wan-Bissaka made 25 Champions League appearances for a club which had just qualified for the Europa League; he has been stuck on 15 since December 2023.
Some outlets went one further and suggested that Man Utd pledged more money if they won the Champions League, despite not advancing beyond the quarter-finals since 2011. In Palace’s eyes, that was fairly accurately deemed by The Guardian ‘to be wildly unrealistic’.
Hugo Ekitike – Reims to Newcastle“Newcastle positioned themselves, we discussed it, they made us an offer that did not suit us,” said Reims president Jean-Pierre Caillot of Hugo Ekitike in January 2022.
“As we do not really want him to leave, we have fixed the price quite high. They did offer us €35m all in, but with a number of bonuses, some of them quasi-impossible to reach. Like for example, winning the Champions League. We want €30m flat and €10m in achievable bonuses.”
The Ligue Un club were far more receptive to a summer approach. Newcastle had expected to complete a deal for striker Ekitike worth €36m, plus €10m in what were described by French sources as far more ‘easily attainable’ bonuses. Perhaps they started with just qualifying for the Champions League first.
But an injury put the move in doubt and the Magpies moved on to other targets long before Paris Saint-Germain swooped. Eddie Howe probably doesn’t regret waiting a little longer for Alexander Isak instead.
Jadon Sancho – Borussia Dortmund to Man Utd
After successfully reeling in Monaco with an add-on worth £7.6m if Anthony Martial finished on a Ballon d’Or podium, Man Utd repeated the trick with Bruno Fernandes four-and-a-half years later. They will owe Sporting Lisbon £4.2m for each of the first three times the Portuguese is named PFA Player of the Year or takes a spot in the Ballon d’Or top three. The current tally stands at zero in either case.
United tried it again when it came to those complicated talks with Borussia Dortmund over Sancho. Despite having ‘forced the Germans’ into selling the winger in August 2020, Sancho inexplicably remained at the Westfalenstadion for almost 12 more months.
Thirteen days after the delayed Euro 2020 final, in which the England international missed a shootout penalty, Man Utd finally had their man. But not before Dortmund shot down any idea of the overall fee being enhanced by that typical bonus due if Sancho finished high in the Ballon d’Or vote.
As an aside, the last Man Utd player to take a podium place in Ballon d’Or voting was 2008 winner Cristiano Ronaldo, who also finished second in 2007. Before then, it was 1999 runner-up David Beckham, Eric Cantona’s third place in 1993 and then bronze for George Best in 1971. It’s hardly a regular occurrence.
Kieran Tierney – Celtic to ArsenalAround the time Tierney was ruled out for the remainder of the season with a knee injury that required surgery in early April 2022, Arsenal might have felt they had already established a substantial enough lead in the pursuit of Champions League qualification.
The Gunners were fourth, four and six points clear of Man Utd and West Ham respectively, with a game in hand on both. Tottenham were a place further back and six points behind, with the north London rivals having 10 games left each.
It should have been sewn up but Arsenal’s form collapsed, in part because of the reshuffling which Tierney’s absence forced. Arsenal lost three consecutive games to Crystal Palace, Brighton and Southampton, then won four on the trot before imploding against Spurs and Newcastle to confirm their slip to fifth.
Celtic never believed in them. It was during talks over Tierney when the Scottish giants, having already rejected a £15m bid for the left-back, scoffed at the structure of a further £25m offer. One of the clauses pertained to Arsenal, Europa League runners-up at the time, qualifying for the Champions League.
Celtic, according to Sky Sports, were ‘not convinced’ that was a ‘realistic’ outcome. It is always worth remembering how far Mikel Arteta has taken Arsenal.
Christian Benteke – Crystal Palace to LiverpoolAn absolutely glorious clause. So good it needs to be retained in its original form, as written by Chris Bascombe of the Daily Telegraph in August 2016:
‘Palace offered an initial £23.5 million with a further £7 million in add-ons. Those additional clauses included £2.5 million should Palace qualify for the Champions League with Benteke scoring 20 goals and playing in 70 per cent of the fixtures of such a top-four campaign. These three conditions formed part of the same clause.’
It turns out ‘this was not considered realistic on Merseyside’. Idiots.
Just four days later, Alan Pardew praised a “brave” club-record deal worth £27m, plus £5m in presumably more sensible add-ons.
Palace only finished 10 places and 35 points off fourth place – Liverpool, funnily enough – with Benteke scoring 15 goals that season. But he did play 94.7% of their games. So, so close.
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