Why Falcao was never moving to the Premier League

In an excellent article by Michael Berlin on Grantland, there is a good description of the strange background to Falcao's move to Monaco. It is essentially a story about the third-party ownership of players and how it impacts the players career. For me a small detail within the story stood out. In a section describing how the club Falcao was transferred to was chosen is the following:

"There are only a few potential buyers ....... Manchester City, Chelsea, and even United are out because ....... the Premier League doesn't allow for the transfer of third-party owned players."

While playing for Atlético Madrid, Falcao was part owned by the club, and part owned by a company called Doyen Sports. Under Premier League rules, if Falcao was to move to a club in the Premier League then the club would have to fully own him. Part ownership, with the rest owned by a third party, is banned.

I'm not going to go into the details of why it's banned here (the article covers many of the issues) but the press have been covering rumours of Falcao being signed by a Premier League club for months (see here and here for example) without ever once mentioning the fact he was part-owned by a third party, as far as I can recall.

This is a huge piece of information to leave out of the story as it has a huge impact on any potential transfer. The third-party interest in the player is there to make money. As the article explains in more detail, young players are funded early in their career as an investment and the third-party then looks to make money over the course of the career as the player becomes more successful. One way this happens is through lucrative transfers.

If the player was to move to a Premier League club then the third-party would have to sell their stake in the player. Doing so, they would be giving up all future returns on their investment. Even if they were willing to do so, the least they would do is demand a much higher transfer fee from a Premier League club than from a club that allowed them to retain their involvement. This would be to compensate them for future earnings they would be giving up.

The effect of this is to make players who have third-party involvement either off-limits, or considerably more expensive for Premier League clubs. Yet from the press reports over the last few months you would not have guessed that Falcao was subject to this restriction and given how common the practise is in certain parts of the world, gives me another reason to doubt the accuracy of transfer rumours reported in the press.