Larsson exposes madness of the Anglo transfer duty

[Cunny]

Larsson exposes madness of the Anglo transfer duty

 

Why does the simple matter of their nationality vastly inflate English players' value in the transfer market?

 

Amy Lawrence

January 21, 2007 12:10 AM

 

The ability to win gracefully ought to be less troublesome a skill than losing with dignity. Last week, however, we witnessed an act of spectacular smugness from the Birmingham City chairman, David Gold. The morning after his team's outstanding demolition of Newcastle United in the FA Cup he thumped himself on the back so hard it was a surprise he didn't knock himself over. Wasn't it admirable, he reasoned, that the Birmingham board had not sacked Steve Bruce a few months ago when the knives were out?

 

Tempting as it is to avoid adding to Gold's self-satisfaction, the fact is Birmingham have been among the smartest operators in English football this season. They don't deserve any medals for standing by Bruce, but they have worked the transfer market particularly well since they were relegated last summer.

 

First, they negotiated two lucrative transfers post-relegation when they persuaded Liverpool to stump up £6.7million for Jermaine Pennant, and Wigan donated £5.5m for Emile Heskey. They have spent around half of the money raised on new talent since the summer, including a hotly disputed fee of £4m for Gary McSheffrey - an instant hit on the wing who has also become one of the club's most reliable goalscorers.

 

The other masterstroke was to raid Arsenal's flourishing youth academy to take three extremely useful prospects - Sebastian Larsson, Nicklas Bendtner and Fabrice Muamba - on season-long loans. So influential have they all been during the promotion challenge, Birmingham would gladly keep all of them if the opportunity arose. But only one of them, Larsson, is really available and a deal will be tied up soon for a very reasonable £500,000.

 

While wishing to avoid the hyperbole - some of it amounting to verbal and written diarrhoea - that has afflicted all forms of mass media on the subject of the Swede's performance at St James' Park last week, it was reminiscent of a young, pre-Posh, David Beckham (minus the free-kicks, it must be said). Larsson was hugely industrious, passed and crossed the ball perceptively from the right, and chipped in with an eagerly taken goal to add to the clever strike that earned his team a replay against Newcastle in the first place. Half a million? A steal.

 

Meanwhile, another right-sided midfield player, who is also versatile, and is exactly the same age as Larsson, is being chased hard in this transfer window. Watford's Ashley Young comes with a valuation of £10m. This is a massive 20 times the price for Larsson. Such a monumental discrepancy is unfathomable - until you consider the special 'Anglo' duty applied to English players, that is.

 

It is not clear exactly who enforces this unwritten law of inflation for domestic talent, or even why, but it is creeping up to absurd levels. Young might be worth a fraction more than Larsson because the Englishman's style is more attacking - always a costlier commodity - but 20 times? Can this really be because Young was born in Stevenage while Larsson was born in Eskiltuna?

 

The prices of English players are generally completely out of proportion with reality. Curtis Davies had one decent season in the Premiership with West Brom and is tagged a £10m player. On the other hand, an experienced international such as the Serbian Nemanja Vidic cost Manchester United a few million less. Micah Richards is a smashing prospect playing full...#8209;back and is priced at £18m. This is almost four times as much as another international who has excelled at Old Trafford this season, the Frenchman Patrice Evra.

 

Is Darren Bent, another in the £10m bracket, worth more than Emmanuel Adebayor or Nicolas Anelka? Is the £18m Manchester United splashed out on Michael Carrick a sensible investment when you could spend the same on Momo Sissoko, Didier Zokora and Pedro Mendes and still have a few million quid in change?

 

The Anglo tax can even apply to English players overseas. If Owen Hargreaves had not pledged himself to the England shirt, extracting him from Bayern Munich would be considerably cheaper. Two of the best players in the Bundesliga joined Premiership clubs last summer - Dimitar Berbatov and Tomas Rosicky. The going rate for top players in Germany is around the £10m mark. Yet the latest transfer fee for Hargreaves, quoted by Franz Beckenbauer and reportedly offered by Manchester United this week, is £20m. Madness.

 

The only possible logic for pushing up the domestic market is the new Uefa ruling that requires a quota of 'homegrown' players in every squad. By the end of the 2008-09 season, at least four players must be products of a club's own academy, and another four graduates from an academy in the same country. But this ruling is not as demanding as it seems. It only affects clubs in European competition and English academy graduates do not necessarily have to be born in England. Therefore a player such as Larsson, who joined Arsenal from Sweden aged 16, counts as homegrown.

 

In many ways English players, as well as clubs, are penalised by football's Anglo tax. An inflated price tag can be a hefty millstone to carry around. It was refreshing to see Richards come out last week and speak of his desire to stay at Manchester City, but it cannot be easy to reject a potentially enormous pay rise while in your teens. On the one hand the Shaun Wright-Phillips example looms large, on the other agents and advisers push for big-money moves and remind you that these opportunities are not guaranteed to come along frequently in a career as short and vulnerable as football.

[Guest Kaizer]

All I can say is that its crazy and it makes no sense what so ever.