The fact that a player has no set price has another advantage, as Grégory Schneider explains:
You can buy a player for a million and sell him on for five, he points out, even if he’s rubbish: for laundering money, it’s a miracle playground.
Without going to the Mexican extreme, with its corrupt league where players are murdered by the cartels3, the way transfers are financed raises questions.
The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, whose assets have been frozen for 2 years, owned Chelsea. A club into which he poured €1.2bn of a fortune built on the privatisation of Russia’s fossil fuels.
More surprisingly, the billionaire is close to Pini Zahavi, an influential Israeli agent who helped broker the sale of Chelsea, and also that of Portsmouth to Michael Eisner (former boss of Disney and Paramount). But above all, Zahavi is THE kingpin of Balkan football.
In June 2015, Cristian Manea had played 5 games for FC Viitorul Constanța, a Romanian club with no national silverware. To everyone’s surprise, his move to Chelsea is announced for €3M4. Except that he is actually bought for €2.5M by Apollon Limassol, a Cypriot club… which loans him to Mouscron (in Belgium) without his ever setting foot in Cyprus5. The reality is more mundane: a Maltese company pockets 40% of the fee.
Why the obscure Royal Excel Mouscron? Well, at that very moment, Gol Football Malta had just bought the club from Lille (LOSC). And that fund… belongs to Pini Zahavi. FIFA cancels the sale, and Latimer International Ltd buys the club instead. Nothing to do with Pini, of course, since this Maltese trust is run by Adar Zahavi, his nephew.
Florian Delestrain, who played at the club at the time, recalls ending up in a 55-player squad in Mouscron’s B team: there were some Portuguese, but mostly Serbs and Croats, and most of them were only passing through.
While nobody says a word about it in our football-mad countries, the same can’t be said of Norway. After signing for Manchester City, owned by the Emiratis, Norwegian star Erling Haaland was given a frosty welcome back home, with banners in the stands.
HE PLAYS FOR DIRTY BLOOD MONEY