Welcome to Soccer 101. My name is Ryan Bailey and on this episode we're going to be talking about loans.

Not the type of loan that some very scary gentlemen give out in return for a very

small favour, or the kind of loan that sees your DVD copy of Donnie Darko lent to a friend

12 years ago and he never gave it back, Sparkle Motion forever, but the kind of loan that sees a soccer

player move between teams. In US sports parlance, athletes move between teams with trades,

which either involve an exchange of players or some kind of capital for a player. In soccer,

players typically move between clubs via transfer, where their registration is moved from one team

to another in exchange for a transfer fee. That transfer fee is paid between the clubs

with an agent often taking a cut of up to 12%. The transfer fee can be avoided if a player is at the

end of their contract when they become a free agent. There's another way players can move between clubs

in what the Premier League officially refers to as temporary transfers,

which are better known as loans. In a loan move, a player can temporarily play for a team

for whom he or she is not under contract or registered with. The team receiving the loan player

usually won't have to pay any kind of fee, usually, but they will be obliged to pay the player's salary,

or at least a proportion of it. Loans are conducted during the summer and winter transfer

windows and can take place outside the windows in rare exceptions known as emergency loans. More on that

a little later on. An existing loan deal can be made permanent at any time outside the

transfer window, though. Loans can last for just a few weeks, a full season or multiple seasons,

and they can happen in a variety of circumstances and for many reasons. I'll get into that shortly,

but first, I want to take a quick look at the history of loans in soccer.

In the early days of the amateur game in the late 1800s, the kind of time period you may have seen documented in the Netflix show, The English Game,

loans between teams were pretty common. Often, a home team would loan an away team, a player or or two if they turned up short on the day,

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