How Town could deal with player contracts
WITH TERMS SET TO END ON JUNE 30 CLUBS FACE DILEMMA
PLAYER contracts and loan terms alike will invariably have June 30 as their end date, which could pose problems for clubs up and down the country.
Take Huddersfield Town, for example. They have six players who have played senior football this season who will be out of contract come July 1: Joel Coleman, Demeaco Duhaney, Jon Gorenc Stankovic, Collin Quaner, Ryan Schofield and Danny Simpson.
On top of that, they have five players on loan from other clubs: Jonas Lossl, Kamil Grabara, Andy King, Emile Smith Rowe and Chris Willock.
Losing those 11 players would be enormously disruptive to their season, even if a transfer window were opened to allow replacements to be brought in - and they could hypothetically be put in a position where they felt they had no choice but to give a new medium-to-longterm deal to a player who they would otherwise be happy to let leave the club, just to keep them around for the sake of the final nine games of the season.
On a broader scale, the implications are no better, as the integrity of the competition would be compromised by allowing teams to make such wholesale changes going into the final stretch of the season - the very reason that transfers have been confined to two transfer windows in the first place.
We have already had quite enough disruption without that scenario unfolding, thanks.
Clubs cannot force players to stay under contract, and we still don’t know how the loan market will be affected by all of this.
So how do we get around this entirely unprecedented and unforeseen issue while staying within the bounds of employment law?
One solution would be for the game’s authorities to declare that full-time professional players cannot play for any other clubs until the postponed fixtures have been played - so loan players can go back to their parent clubs but won’t be able to play for them, and out-of-contract players can leave if they want, but can’t go and play for anyone else for potentially months.
In return to avoid making it entirely one-sided, clubs would be obliged to offer at the very least onemonth rolling contracts to all players out of contract within the next six months, on the same terms as they are currently on, on an opt-out basis.
This may need to be taken into account in a wider financial bailout for clubs who are at risk of going under.
Players should then be much more likely to agree to accept a short-term extension, knowing that if they can’t go and actually play elsewhere anyway then they may be just as well sticking around their existing clubs, and loan parent clubs would have a major incentive not to pull their best-performing kids back from their short-term deals.
It’s not ideal, but we are long past the point of finding any ideal situations.
What it would do, unless we are very much mistaken, is help to transfer the balance of power back towards the clubs helping to maintain of what status quo remains.