“Blind dates” came to football: what is Transfer Room, the new concept for clubs and agents to get contacts and agree on passes

Two people sit on either side of the table willing to get to know each other. They were recorded on a website and they have fifteen minutes to see if there is compatibility or not, if there is any contact left or if nothing happens between them. But it is not a couple, but two leaders of different football clubs or, in very rare cases, a leader and an agent of footballers. When the time passes completely, a bell will sound indicating that the meeting is over and that other stakeholders, already scheduled, are waiting for both parties.

The members of “Transfer Room”, the organizing company of the “Madrid-Summit” in a luxurious hotel on the outskirts of the Spanish capital, say it clearly: “We do matchmaking services”, which means that for forty-eight hours they become, with everything meticulously organized, virtual celestine football to connect parties that would otherwise need to be searched for weeks, if not months, and would have to spend much more money to hold meetings with peers from other markets that they did not previously know.

This is the second meeting of the year with club leaders from much of the world, because another one had already been organized in Orlando, United States, and it is planned to return to Madrid by June and perhaps the Arab Emirates or Qatar by the end of the year, due to the success of this initiative that brought together 222 entities, including the Manchester City, Barcelona, Milan, Newcastle, many teams from the United States Major League Soccer (MLS), the Mexican league, Flamengo, Atlético Mineiro or Atlético Paranaense in Brazil and even Aldosivi, as the only Argentine representative.

The idea was born in 2016 when Danish director Jonas Ankesen began extensive market research and held many meetings with sports directors of football clubs across Europe to learn how player transfers worked and understood that the most obvious problem was the lack of transparency and access to a credible information (agents claiming to represent players who were not such, distorted values, among other factors). What he noted as a fact of greatest attention was that there was no direct line of communication between those responsible for both sides in decision-making. The buying clubs did not have reliable information about which players were available and the sellers were ignoring which player profile the buyers intended, it was a kind of broken phone, with many intermediaries between them.

So Ankesen came up with the idea of “Transfer Room”. “More market access and more transparency, end restrictions on club access to pass markets and we are changing it with the digital age,” says who is the founder and CEO of the London-based company today. “We empower our customers to succeed in the pass market by giving them instant access to the best market information and an unmatched network of global connections,” he adds.

In just under six years, they managed to get 650 clubs from around the world to be part of agreements that they encouraged, to score seven entire leagues (including Denmark, Norway, the United States or Mexico), with 17 meetings since they were launched and with an average of 2.5 agreements per 9.5 fifteen-minute matches, 1,527 closed deals before the last event in Madrid, which ended on Tuesday and 103,000 launches and interactions.

One of the biggest coincidences among club leaders from different countries, as several told Infobae, is that an important part of the success of this new and large-scale way of negotiating is due to the small number of agents who participated (including two Argentines, a single player representative linked to one) of the big clubs, while the other came from the organization of Christian Bragarnik, on behalf of Elche in Spain).

“Transfer Room” places great emphasis on the fact that the few agents participating in these meetings are thoroughly checked, must be registered with FIFA and have an accredited and serious track record, which allows clubs to negotiate directly and that in very few situations an intermediary is added in what is usually the case call “Double Agreement” (Club + Agent with Club).

For Argentine football, however, all this seems far away. There was hardly one leader, Ciro Lubrano, from Aldosivi — who was very happy and who has already been part of these meetings — and a handful of agents from foreign companies and even a representative of the Greek Olympiakos, but there is general agreement that albicelestial entities are not well seen because, they argue, they change they often seem, especially in the quotes of their players, and they are not transparent in their actions either. Others attribute their absence to the annual fee that must be paid in hard currency to be part of the system, although the results are optimal.

In fact, this is certified by Federico Fredl and Guillermo Acquarone, from the Uruguayan Boston River, very satisfied with nearly twenty meetings to try to place players in clubs abroad. Undoubtedly, this new system can be a problem for Argentine clubs if they remain far from this world that is already approaching the main European, Mexican or American institutions.

“Before, we had to wait for our main players to go through Argentine football to jump abroad, but today this is no longer the case and we have direct contact. The Uruguayan leaders say that Ronald Araujo, today with continuity in Barcelona and author of a leading goal against Real Madrid in the last Spanish classic, left Boston River to play directly for Barcelona B and is already part of the celestial team, while they managed to place the central scoreboard Gonzalo Álvarez in Getafe and now they were trying it with the new jewel, the “box to box” steering wheel Alan Rodríguez.

One of the biggest problems for the coming years of Argentine football may be the economic distance that clubs in countries where the law allows the contribution of private capital to form what is called “The Multiclubs” (Multi Club Ownership, MCO), alliances through which the same group goes buying sports entities in different countries, managed from the slogan of cost-efficient, an upward path to their players, and search for opportunities in the global market.

One of the new examples is that of “Sport Republic”, which last January acquired most of the shares of the English Southampton, which plays in the Premier League, or the purchase, by the US MCO “777 Partners” of the Belgian Standart Liege and seventy percent of Brazil's Vasco da Gama, aided by the change of corporate law anonymous in this country, and which are added to the Spanish Seville and the Italian Genoa.

Standart Liege was the first major Belgian club to become foreign-owned, but now half of the country's twenty-four professional entities are part of the MCO groups. For example, the RDW Molenbeek was acquired by Hollywood virtual reality guru John Textor, 56, who also took ninety percent of Botafogo, as well as being the largest shareholder of the Crystal Palace, of the English Premier League.

In turn, one of Textor's partners at Crystal Palace, David Blitzer, recently acquired the Dutch ADO Den Haag for his group Bolt Holdings, which includes investments in German Ausburg, Belgian Waasland Beveren, Portugal's Estoril and Spanish Alcorcón and as if that were not enough, Real Salt Lake shares in the MLS, but the latter separately and not within the group, in what is considered a complex matrix of operations.

At the moment, MCOs comprise more than 160 clubs around the world, managed by more than sixty groups. For example, between Philip Platek and Paul Conway alone, they own nine clubs in eight European countries.

Conway, whose Pacific Media Group has shares in Barnsley in England, Den Bosch in the Netherlands, Esbjerg from Denmark, KV Oostende from Belgium, Nancy in France and FC Thun in Switzerland, believes that “the experience of owning club properties in the United States is essential, especially with people who come from investing in other sports and that he then applies those formulas to football”. He now has his eye on clubs in Germany and Poland.

For his part, Piatek believes that his club portfolio will double in the next five years. For now he owns the Spezia in Italy, Casa Pia in Portugal and the Sønderjysk in Denmark.

“We look at the club's financial structure,” Piatek describes. We seek a clean balance and in the overall cost structure. There is also the cultural aspect to consider, because there are certain geographies that don't want or don't like foreign ownership. And then infrastructure is important. What are the restrictions for stadium renovations? All these factors play a role.”

Rasmus Ankersen, co-founder and CEO of “Sport Republic” tries to explain how MCOs should work: “Every club must play a role for the benefit of the entire system. In order to work together and get the maximum benefits of being more than one, you need to think carefully about where the club positions within the system. We are looking for unique things, such as a very good academy, a history of youth development, a large fan base... or a one-city club, which creates commercial revenue potential that is difficult to replicate.”

Ankersen is no makeshift. He was co-director of football at Brentford in the English Premier League, and president of FC Midtylland, both owned by Matthew Benham. If these two teams had a relationship as “cousins”, Brentford's promotion to the English top flight gave him the character of “big brother” and it was sought that the players show themselves more in the highest value team, as was the case with Nigerian Frank Onyeka.

There are also cases of slightly smaller alliances, such as Watford and Udinese, Leicester and OH Leuven, Monaco and Cercle Brugge.

“Trasnfer Room” counts the steps in the club transfer process: 1) Pre-Scouting, 2) Identification of Needs, 3) Requirements for Sharing, 4) Identification of Potential Players, 5) Negotiation of Terms, 6) Termination of Agreement.

The new organization has everything in mind. So much so that in addition to coffee, lunch or the bell that rings every fifteen minutes, each participant is given a box of mint gum. It's just that with so many meetings, you'll probably have to freshen your breath.

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