The Athletic.

Hello, I'm Mark Chapman.

Welcome to the Business of Sport podcast on The Athletic.

Each week we'll take you behind the curtain into the world of football business

and other sports across the globe, alongside me today.

From The Athletic, it's football news reporter Matt Slater.

And we're going to be joined by two of football's leading economic and legal minds,

Daniel G and Stefan Simanski, to help us ponder the question, should football scrap transfer fees?

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Well, let's start with the question of scrapping transfer fees because this is the piece that

you've written, Matt, on The Athletic this week. I just wonder, why now have you written it

and what made you write it? Well, why now? Well, I wrote it because mainly because it's the

January transfer window and we are doing

a big series of features that are all transfer related and I thought, well, that's fine. It's good

to know every element of that game, which is by far the most popular thing we do. We have a whole

podcast dedicated to transfers. I'm just going to sort of, you know, be devil's advocate here, which is interesting because we're about to speak to an advocate, and say, well, why does football have transfer fees? You know, rugby union doesn't. Rugby League sort of did, has sort of got out of the habit of having them now. Cycling was a sport I used to cover. Had a famous one that I was one of the first stories I worked on. But, you know, that didn't set a trend. It's very much the one off. Of course, we know US sport doesn't. Good reasons for that, which we might get into, hopefully. Cricket doesn't. So there's something quite unusual about football. That's the first thing. And then you start to sort of think about that

and go, hold on a minute, would I accept a transfer type system in my career if someone comes calling

and wants to offer me a job? Would I say, hold on a minute, you've got to pay my current lot,

quite a lot of money to release me from my contract. I can't

come. Oh, sorry, the job's not yours then. You know, if you can't come now, then we'll get someone else. I mean, that's, that's a bit odd. So, you know, it got me thinking along all these things. And of course, I'm not the only one that's been thinking along these lines. Thief Pro, the well players union have they've they've had a they've had a go at the transfer system they backed down and sort of

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