The art of selling your best player: ‘It is all about being proactive rather than reactive’

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Brighton and Hove Albion have become experts at it. Wolverhampton Wanderers have done it regularly in the past couple of years. Bournemouth are becoming familiar with the challenge.

Aston Villa had mixed success when trying it, and Tottenham Hotspur largely got it wrong.

Managing the sale of your best player has become a vital skill for many Premier League football clubs in recent years. Several clubs now build their operation on a plan to create stars and sell them at a profit to reinvest in the next crop of players, making smooth sales imperative.

But with long-term planning, delicate negotiations and close relationships with agents, there is more to it than supporters might think.

The Athletic consulted two executives, who have experience working at Premier League clubs and have been involved in selling star players to wealthier rivals, to get their reflections on how the deals unfolded.

Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, so, for the sake of clarity, we will refer to them as Director A and Director B.

“It is all about being proactive rather than reactive,” said Director A. “If you have people around who are comfortable with being reactive, then it can get difficult, but if everyone buys into a proactive plan, then it can work really well.”

This summer, the challenge of handling the loss of stars has been felt most acutely by Bournemouth, who have sold defenders Dean Huijsen and Milos Kerkez to Real Madrid for £50million ($68m) and Liverpool for £40m respectively.

Milos Kerkez has joined Liverpool from Bournemouth (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

In most cases, clubs find ways to manage the departure of their best players smoothly, with Director A revealing how communication is key, often beginning several months before the transfer window arrives when a key figure is likely to leave.

“You pretty much always know when a player is going,” he said. “You will start to hear rumours, and then it’s about sitting down and having an honest conversation with the player and his agent.

“And then you usually come to an agreement where you say, ‘If the right deal is available, then it might be the right time for everyone for the player to move on’.

“Once you have had that conversation and you know a player is going in the next window or the window after that, you can start future-proofing to make sure you have replacements already in place.”

Replacing Huijsen and Kerkez will be the biggest task for Bournemouth this summer, especially with the club relatively new to big-money departures — but the club’s most recent work in replacing a high-profile star was successful enough to give supporters confidence for the season ahead.

Last summer, Bournemouth sold Dominic Solanke, their attacking spearhead, to Tottenham for £65m. Under Andoni Iraola, they still improved their Premier League finishing position from 12th to ninth, thanks in large part to 10 goals from Evanilson, who they bought last summer for just over half the Solanke windfall, and 12 and 11 from Justin Kluivert and Antoine Semenyo, who they had signed in earlier windows in what looked suspiciously like a succession plan.

When Brighton sold their first-choice midfielders, Moises Caicedo (to Chelsea) and Alexis Mac Allister (to Liverpool), for a combined £150m in the same summer, it took a couple of years to replace them fully, despite the immediate signing of Carlos Baleba.

A year later, the arrivals of Georginio Rutter, Mats Wieffer and Matt O’Riley gave the club more midfield options, lifting them back into the top half of the Premier League last season following a slip to 11th in their first season without the influential duo.

At Wolves, the departures of talisman Ruben Neves and veteran partner Joao Moutinho two summers ago were mitigated hugely by the presence of two midfielders they had signed a few months earlier. Joao Gomes and Mario Lemina became the first-choice midfield pairing in the first 18 months of Wolves’ post-Neves team.

Wolves were prepared for Neves’ exit (Naomi Baker/Getty Images)

It does not always work so well. When Gareth Bale left Tottenham for Real Madrid in 2013, Spurs spent the £85m they received for their star on seven players.

They were dubbed the “magnificent seven” but had mixed fortunes. Some were more successful than others, but only Christian Eriksen could be considered a clear success.

Aston Villa appeared to have everything worked out when they sold Jack Grealish to Manchester City in 2021, a year after tying him down to a new contract with a £100m release clause.

Then-CEO Christian Purslow addressed fans in a video when Grealish departed, explaining they had planned for this scenario and had decided that three new signings were needed to replace all of Grealish’s attributes and reduce an overreliance on one player.

Emiliano Buendia struggled to make an impact at Villa Park, Danny Ings scored goals sporadically, and Leon Bailey came good belatedly, although arguably not to the level Villa hoped.

Still, Director A believes long-term planning and acting before a sale is the best way to avoid leaving a gaping void.

“It works if you are future-proof,” he said. “So we had a key player who was going and we signed another player six months earlier, so he had time to bed in.

“Then we knew we had our replacement in place, he was settled at the club, and we didn’t have to go out and buy a direct replacement when selling clubs knew we had a big chunk of money in our pockets.

“In an ideal world, you get your replacements first and give them a chance to adapt and settle in without any of the pressure of starting every week and being expected to replace your best player.

“And because they are already at the club, when the time comes, the fans don’t necessarily view them as the direct replacement for ‘Player X’, so that takes some of the pressure off, too.

“And it also gives you some time, so if the player you’ve signed has come in and really struggled, then you know that you need to go out and get someone else to give that player a bit more time to adapt.

“The key thing is that everyone understands the strategy and buys into it, so the whole club is ideally working a year ahead — six months at a minimum.

“It doesn’t work out exactly as you envisage. Sometimes you agree a player can go, but then the right deal isn’t available and the player asks to stay for another six months or a year. As long as the player is committed and willing to apply himself, that’s fine.

“But you also need to have multiple assets. If your model as a club is to sell one big asset every year and reinvest the money, it’s no good if you only have one.

“You have to make sure you always have four or five who you could sell for good money so that if the deal isn’t there for the one you planned to sell, you can change plans and sell somebody else, and so you know you have assets you can look to sell in future years.”

Villa struggled to replace Grealish (Clive Mason/Getty Images)

While these are the best-case scenarios, it does not always work out as smoothly as hoped, according to Director B.

“At that level of the market, you are usually dealing with the biggest and best agents, players that are potentially full of tantrums if it is not going to happen, because they are life-changing contracts,” he said.

“It’s becoming increasingly common that family members are directly involved in the transfer, which is tricky. Of course, then it is personal and emotional — everything you don’t want it to be in a negotiation.

“All the things you try to do in a negotiation — depersonalise it, keep it very objective, don’t let subjectivity come into it — become difficult with family members.

“Emotions of the agent also come into it sometimes, because often it is their biggest payday, or if the agent has one player in their stable, this is their one payday. If he doesn’t make it big on that player, he is not making it at all.”

(Top photos: Getty Images)

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