Championship is now tasty market
TWENTY years ago, perhaps even ten, it would have been unfathomable for a side of Lazio’s pedigree to go shopping in the Championship. Nesta, Nedved, Veron and Vieri. These are the sorts of names we associate with the Roman giants. Not Morgan Whittaker.
Yet there they were, in the final hours of deadline day, desperately trying to lure the 23-year-old away from Plymouth Argyle.
“When a team like that makes an offer, it shows how far you’ve come,” said Whittaker, and he’s got every right to feel proud. Don’t forget that he spent the first half of last season on loan at the Pilgrims in League One before being recalled by Swansea.
Without doubt, Lazio’s interest in Whittaker is a reflection of Italian football’s diminished status in the global game.
Last month, ministers controversially scrapped the so-called ‘Beckham Law’ that gave hefty tax breaks to overseas players.
Even before that intervention, Serie A was struggling to compete with rival ‘Big Five’ competitions, its annual revenues dwarfed by the Premier League and only marginally greater than France’s Ligue 1, the perennial minnows of the group.
Lazio can no longer strut around Harrods selecting the cream of the crop. They have to take what they can get.
Yet the pursuit of Whittaker, which Lazio conducted alongside similarly fruitless negotiations to sign Sunderland’s Jack Clarke, is as much about the Championship’s growing profile on the international stage as it is about the weakness of Italian football.
Once, Championship exports were novelty acts, like the time Jay Bothroyd joined Perugia and ended up playing with Colonel Gaddafi’s son. Or they flopped, like Oliver Burke at RB Leipzig.
Either way, the perception from overseas clubs - not altogether unfairly - was that the EFL produced athletes, not footballers, and merited little serious consideration. Recent years, however, have smashed those prejudices to smithereens. Last summer, Sporting Lisbon shelled out a club-record fee of 20m euros to sign Viktor Gyokeres from Coventry City, where he scored 38 times in 91 Championship appearances.
They have been handsomely rewarded. The 25-year-old Swede is averaging almost a goal a game in Portugal’s top flight and is currently valued at anything between £70m and £90m.
In Germany, Nathan Tella is also doing the business. Twelve months ago, the Lambeth-born winger was starring on loan at Burnley, his heroics in the Championship mystifyingly overlooked by parent club Southampton. Last Saturday, the 24-year-old scored twice for a Bayer Leverkusen side riding high at the top of the Bundesliga.
Like Sporting, Leverkusen spent big. The 23.3m euros gambled on Tella last summer is the third-highest transfer in the club’s history, and a clear illustration that overseas clubs now regard the Championship as a breeding ground for worldclass players.
There are several possible reasons for this. The Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) has matured into a system that is producing high-calibre players and coaches in such great volumes that many are forced into the EFL in search of opportunities, raising standards across the board.
Sophisticated
Similarly, many Championship clubs now have sophisticated scouting networks plugged into untapped overseas markets. Coventry’s purchase and subsequent development of Dutch playmaker Gus Hamer - subsequently signed by Sheffield United for £15m - is one obvious example.
Perhaps there has also been a recognition that the famed inconsistency of Championship players is a reflection not of lesser ability but of the fatigue engendered by a gruelling 46game season.
You need only look at the recent performances of Eddie Howe’s injury-hit Newcastle (brilliant one day, awful the next) in the top-flight to see what happens when nobody gets a day off.
If a player is posting impressive stats when he’s shattered, it stands to reason that - like Gyokeres - he’ll return even better numbers when he’s not.
There is now a growing sense that the world has woken up to the potential of the Championship and that clubs like Lazio will soon be wheeling their trolleys through the aisles on a bi-annual basis.