Often when people talk about a “selling club”, it’s with tones of resignation or pitying contempt.

These tones signify the concept that to be a selling club is to be a failure on some level. To resign oneself that your club has to sell often surmises that your best players will be snatched away (shades of Huddlestone). 

Conversely if you are a fan and you talk of a smaller club that usually needs to sell, it is often with a tone of disdain or as a friend once described Fulham, “that nice little club in Putney”.

But the truth is we are all selling clubs now. Even the Manures of this world have to sell when Real Madrid get their avaricious clutches into the likes of Ronaldo.

And this week we learned of the detestable Ferguson’s letter to the injured captain of Standard Liege, Stephen Defour. To my mind this was a clear case of reminding Standard that they can expect to receive a nice fat fee in the not too distant future when Defour makes a full recovery.  Talk about brazen cheek!

And so it goes on, down the food chain, until we come to Derby County and we also learn that Clough’s team are keeping tabs on six or seven players in League 1 and 2.

The days of players like Barrowcliffe staying loyal for a career have long gone.  In his day, there was little to gain by moving, possibly a few England caps if you were good enough, which wouldn’t pay much of the mortgage. 

Players often had to consider their club houses, children at school, wives earning a nice little extra whack and it’s not too surprising that many stayed at the same clubs throughout their playing life. 

Nowadays, if a club comes calling – there is a real financial recompense that far outweigh the disadvantages of moving.  With two or three judicious moves, a player can be set up for life, even if they only ever play in the Championship.  And so, there is a real advantage in moving on rather than staying put, which adds to the system of buying and selling that all clubs are part of these days.

The trick is to use this system in the right way.  Some of the smaller clubs had this down to a fine art over the years – securing survival by selling their best players to pay the bills of the following year.

The transfer windows and the sheer financial muscle of the Premiership has skewed this so that life down the smaller and poorer clubs is now much more precarious as rather than buy an expensive English player, many Premiership and even Championship clubs prefer to buy the finished article from foreign climes for perhaps half the price.

But look at Arsenal’s record of buying and selling.  Adebayor bought for £4m and sold for £25m, Anelka for £500k and sold for £22m, and Toure for £150k and sold for £16m.  The gross gain on these three buys and sells alone is in the region of an astonishing £57m.

And I think it is no accident that Preston – much further down the pecking order have just appointed David Unsworth to work with first year professionals.  This is apparently a new job to develop this class of younger players. Preston has not had many young players break through in their recent history and with poor crowd attendances, are apparently drifting into a kind of no man’s land according to a recent report.

Being almost good enough for the play-offs but fall short every year as they don’t have the financial muscle – or more importantly, the playing squad to make that bit of difference. Not too surprising then that a certain Jock, small of stature, a good coach but a lousy developer of young players chose to look for richer pastures.

So if I were managing Derby County (which I hasten to add, am not and would not wish to do so) I might be thinking quite seriously about building up my youth development for two reasons: to improve the team and secondly to sell for considerable profit.

The caveat would be that I would hold onto the players until they were well developed and able to command a much bigger fee as opposed to selling them too young and cheaply as we did with Huddlestone. 

By holding onto players, I would be assured that the chances of injuries would be lower as ageing limbs after the age of 25 are more likely to break down more often.  There would also be many other reasons for taking on the Wenger doctrine of buying or developing younger players – not least the player’s ability to learn and grow which inevitably wanes after a player has reached his peak around 27 – 29. 

But for me, the clinching point would be that the value would grow to a point where it became welcome to accept the sale. There is a right time to sell.

We have had a recent history of buying expensively and selling badly, often with costs attached to the disposal of players.  That needs to stop and a cycle of buy cheaply, develop and sell high and at the right time needs to start for future prosperity.

In my view, this is the way forward for us – a small city team, just about managing 30,000 at home compared to Arsenal with 60,000 seats each home game filled.  We have to be realistic and use our resources to the best we can and not squander them for immediate gain. 

Unfortunately this all takes time and I’m sure there will be many disgruntled fans along the way when we sell our best assets at the right time, while bargain hunting for recruits. 

Photo: Action Images

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