For a club like Manchester City, with an astronomical wage bill, the prospect of trying to offload the vast swathes of players you have acquired in recent years is a daunting one indeed. Few clubs want to pay similar prices that were initially paid for these players and even fewer want to pay the wages that said players have become accustomed to. Subsequently the option of loaning out unwanted players at a club like Manchester City is an attractive one. They might not be able to sell their players, but at least they can reduce the wage bill. There is nothing wrong with this in itself. Any club who has unwanted players on their pay roll has a responsibility to that player’s career to ensure that they facilitate as much playing time as possible for that player. However when any club allows a player to leave on loan, is it right that the player on loan should be allowed to compete against all of their parent club’s rivals without ever being allowed to face their parent club itself?
Emmanuel Adebayor is the most poignant example but he is not the only one. For a club such as City, for whom money is not an issue, it almost seems to work out to their advantage that they should be able to loan out a top class striker to a rival and therefore allow him to play for Spurs against Chelsea, Man Utd, Arsenal and Liverpool without having the danger of ever being able to play in matches against City. If Tottenham are paying the majority of his wages then this situation, which benefits City as much as it does Tottenham, has more than a slight negative tint when it comes to the issue of fair competition. Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger is one of the managers to speak out against such scenarios:
“If he [Adebayor] is on loan, he should be able to play against everybody. That is the only thing I believe. Before, remember, you had a choice. There was a period when you had the choice [of allowing on loan players to play against their parent club] and I never, never refused the choice. I always said ‘yes you can play against us’ even though, one time, we loaned Francis Jeffers and he scored against us. I allowed Jermaine Pennant to play against us with Leeds. I always allowed the players to play. I would allow Nicklas Bendtner to play against us [for Sunderland].”
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To let Bendtner play against Arsenal is still unfair… However, only to Sunderland fans.
He’s shocking… I’m 33, unfit and overweight sat in an office scoffing a pack of cookies and I could do a better job on the pitch than him !
Simple way to solve the ‘problem’, don’t allow loans within the same division.
Loans should essentially be for the younger, fringe players of the “bigger” clubs to get competitive playing time. Not to farm out the unrequired first team squad players that they don’t want, but decided to buy anyway.
This would also have the benefit in making some players think twice about signing for the huge paypackets, when their only chance of playing is in a lower division.