Hello, and welcome to The Double Pivot, the world's most agreeable soccer analytics podcast. I am Michael Kaley. We are back. The transfer deadline is passed.
The transfer window is closed, slammed shut, some might say. And we are having a transfer saga. We are having a story with backs and forths and ins and outs and players saying one thing and then another thing. And we still don't have totally clear reporting on what the outcome of it even was, even though we know that Matisse Tell has been announced as a Tottenham player on loan for the rest of the season.
That much we do know. We're gonna sort of talk through the ins and the outs of this, the narrative of it, and, you know, the soccer, the real on-the-field soccer analytics business of it as well. I'm joined by Mike Goodman. It is, it's a transfer window.
Yeah, it's a bunch of transfer windows. Let's do it. I don't know, we're doing a bunch of small post-window podcasts here, so I don't know what's going where, but the music internet on the way in is regardless. Come hang out in the Discord regardless.
And let's talk about Matisse Tell. I think we should go over what happened, just because it was so, so silly. So, so where this starts is that Tell asks out. Tell makes a transfer request to Bayern, and Bayern accept this, and a few teams come in for him.
Tottenham, most clearly. Apparently there were offers on loan from like Frankfurt, teams in Germany were interested. And United and Arsenal, reportedly, were looking into this. Spurs came to an agreement with United and reportedly with Tell's.
Spurs came to an agreement with Bayern and reportedly with Tell's agent for a permanent transfer at €60 million. And this was then rejected by Tell, who didn't want to come to Tottenham. And then the reporting gets kind of fuzzy, because what was happening then was that Bayern were not accepting offers from United and Arsenal. Not clear how solid those offers were, but at least they were pushing back on interest from teams that were only offering a loan.
And United, it appeared, at some point it appeared they had PSR problems, and maybe just didn't want to pay. And Arsenal were not sure. Arsenal had other irons in the fire as well. But then this sort of became like maybe Tell would return to Bayern.
And then suddenly, transfer deadline morning, it was reported that Tell was going to Spurs on a just a loan, the thing that reportedly Bayern had been saying no to. And then while Tell is, as far as I can tell, in the plane on the way to London, English reporters start saying that the deal is a loan with an option to buy. And this then is finally confirmed. The deal includes an option in some form, but it has now been reported that there is a loan fee of up to €10 million.
No one knows what that means. There are reports that the option price is either €55 or €60 million. And Tell's agent has said that the option can only be exercised with Tell's consent, which is somewhat unusual for this. So we still don't even know what has happened.
And it is still unclear exactly what switched and how the loan became possible. It was a saga. Yeah, okay, so I think let's start breaking this down by looking at where, like what Tell is as a player. Because I do think this sort of underscores what all the related parties want out of this, because it's a little bit off.
Because Tell is a young player who absolutely, when you look at his numbers, has a lot of upside. But he is also not that great right now. And accordingly, he doesn't play all that much, right, for Bayern. He plays a decent amount of sub-minutes, but he just doesn't play all that much for Bayern.
And given that, like, he wanted to go play. Bayern, having a young player under their control who has a lot of upside, do not want to lose their control of that player without a whole bunch of money coming the other way. That is part of the reason why they bought him from Rennes. They do this.
You buy him for like €10 million when he's a teenager, €15 million when he's a teenager. Because if you're gonna, even if he doesn't end up being a star for you, you want to be able to sell him on. Like, part of what makes that math work is like, oh, well, he's maybe not going to be a good enough player to be, maybe he won't develop to be a good enough player to be a Bayern starter regularly. But there's, you know, you can sell that player for €35 million, who is good enough to be a regular starter on, say, Tottenham.
But right now, he's could be either, still. Yep. And so you have Tell who wants to play, and Bayern who don't want to lose control of this player. It leaves sort of relatively narrow band what you can do here.
Yeah, and one thing that Bayern, I think, really didn't want is for Tell to have a bad half season and then come back to Bayern with that market value, which is his primary likely value to Bayern, having taken a big hit. Right, although, like, as it turns out, they were not able to avoid that because they were not able to get an obligation to buy into any deal. Well, and that's the funny thing, is that they did. Tottenham did do.
I think it probably was a loan with obligation to buy. Tottenham have really liked doing loans with obligation. I think it, it makes the paperwork at the deadline much simpler. And then you get a little bit of something to renegotiate later.
I just maybe we should, like, pause here to talk about, like, the various way that loan to something work. Yes, this is really important here. A lot of what you see when deals are announced as loans with an obligation to buy are just sales. They're just sales that are delayed basically for FFP and accounting purposes.
Or, like, when you see really long-term loans. Like, you know, there was a period of time when I think, like, Fernando Torres got loaned out by Chelsea to Atletico for like two and a half years or something. Like a two and a half year loan. It's like, well, they're just selling him, but not for accounting pieces.
So oftentimes when you start hearing loans with options out, especially with obligation to buy, it's just a sale. Loans with options to buy are a little bit rarer, but they are usually loans. They are usually primarily loans with the team taking the player on loan, wanting to protect their upside. So, like, you don't want a loan in a guy who becomes a superstar.
And then at the end of that season or that half season, you get, like, nothing for having developed him into a superstar. Because if you have a loan with an option to buy, like, let's say Matisse Tell does something over the second half of this season and turns him into, like, an £85 million player. There's very little chance Tottenham's actually going to keep that player, right? Like, there's very little chance that Tell agrees to sign a long-term deal that Tottenham, like, have budgeted in a contract for a player with that upside when, say, whether it's Bayern, whether it's Chelsea, whether it's whoever, want him.
But because they have the option to buy, they can just flip him. And now they have protected the upside, even if it's not like they get him in control. So, all of which is to say that, like, you should interpret this as a Spurs fan, I think, as mostly a loan. And, like, the series of events that land you at permanent control of Tell have to hit a very, very narrow range of worth €55-€60 million plus Tell is not getting better offers from somewhere else.
And so this is the point where the exact mechanics of loan with obligation and loan with option matter because the weird thing about them is that while they are always, they are more or less always followed through as if the option and the obligation just exist, all contracts in European soccer are the isn't there someone you forgot to ask meme. The player can always just say no to signing a contract, and even when there is a loan with an obligation, you can't, with a loan obligation, you can in theory write contractual language that, like, this contract will be valid at the moment that the obligation is completed. With a loan with option, you can't, like, lock the player in. The player has a right to say no somewhere in there.
It's just generally accepted that they have made an agreement. And reportedly, there is a contract agreement between Tell and Spurs that exists. But his agent has made clear to reporters in Germany that he understands his contractual right not to sign, which is both restating something that is the case, but restating something that no one ever says because the norms around this are that contracts agreed when an option deal is made are good contracts. And so, this is the odd place that we're in.
If I may do a little bit of storytelling here. If I had to guess what's going on, Matisse Tell really had no interest in going to Tottenham. He would have been happy going to Manchester United, clearly. I think probably Arsenal, but not Tottenham.
But Tottenham is the only team that really stepped up in a way that Bayern was happy with. And so everything had to be finessed to get Tell to agree, like, oh, you're only going to Tottenham for six months. Which includes being like, yes, there's an option to buy, but no, you don't have to go still. Because that's what makes everybody happy.
And then we will see what happens at the end of the six months if there's a battle over this, which is like, it's like future Tottenham's Until after Tottenham was the only option. We think, we think. What clearly happened, and this was reported the night before, was Arsenal were out the night before the deadline. And I think pretty clearly it was reported Manchester United were a loan-only option.
But then that's what they took. Like that's the piece that is, I think... Well, they took, they took, there's an option to buy in there, a high option at €60 million. Like this is what you're saying, a loan with an option is just a loan.
It's the same issue. I mean, I think that, that's not like obviously clear to me that Bayern fixed that. Part of the reason this story is so hard to piece together is that Bayern Munich are a very odd football club as a operation. I think that the simplest way of thinking about it is if you followed transfer sagas in England in the 2010s and you know what it's like when Manchester United were in for a player and there were a dozen like former Manchester United players in the media giving their takes and sometimes being sources with dubious amounts of information that were, it was unclear how much of it was opinion mixed with fact.
That's just what Bayern are. And so everything that Bayern does, there's a dozen old Bayern people talking about what Bayern are or should be doing and nobody knows which is which. And so the reporting goes all over the place. True.
I mean, and then on top of that, we've like spent so much time talking about various English clubs front office operations or lack thereof. Bayern have no joined up cohesive plan in any capacity. I mean, last year they hired the Red Bull guy. They're trying to move in the right direction, but this is just like a bunch of old German board members all weighing in on their opinions on what should happen.
Like it's just, that's how they do business. So to return to Matisse Tell, the soccer player who is presumably going to be playing soccer for Tottenham for some months. The interesting thing about him to me is that he has been described by most scouts analysts as a striker, that he is in the future, he's going to be a striker. Now for Bayern, who have Harry Kane, he has occasionally, he has almost always played as a sub.
So it's huge, huge sub area in his minutes. But he has also played off a striker, sometimes in sort of a quasi too late in the game chasing a match, sometimes he plays a Kane, and sometimes just like as a wing sub. And so he has his statistics are attacking midfield, you know, not attacking midfield, his statistics are inside forward, wide forward numbers, way, way, way more touches than a striker would normally get, which he seems, and a whole bunch of take-ons. My, my, like the main thing I see from watching him and looking at tape is that this is clearly a guy with a lot of technical ability.
This is clearly a guy who can do a bunch of stuff with the ball, who can kick the ball hard, who likes to try to beat a man with tricky little moves. And there has been a lot of end product from that at Bayern, but it is not totally clear that there will be a lot of end product from that if instead of mostly facing tired defenses who are having to key on Jamal Musiala or Harry Kane or Leroy Sane, you're the main guy. I don't know, like what he looks like to me is a bundle of tools that have a very good chance of being a very good player, but that probably isn't one right now. Maybe he's bad production at Bayern, but like, I think the, the, the change in context is so large.
It's hard to say what he's likely to do right off the bat. Yeah, I think that that's all correct. I mean, like, I sort of look at Tell and I'm like, stylistically at the moment, you fit in right between Musiala and Kane on, on the spectrum of forward to 10, but you're not nearly as good yet. I mean, I think that like, if you told me he was going to be on Tottenham for the next four years, I'd be like, oh, that makes sense with Ange developing and, and, and, you know, like that sort of like Dejan Kulusevski-esque but athletic, or like, you know, James Madison, but more forwardy, or, you know, son, but a little more midfieldery.
And like, maybe he gets better and turns into one of those more clearly, but better. Like, I get how, like, as a talent bundle, he fits in that system. For a six-month loan right now? I mean, you need bodies, right?
If you're Tottenham. Like everybody's hurt and you need bodies. So, okay. I get that.
It's a little bit weird for me where like, Tottenham are in a weird place, right? So it's hard for me to envision, like, what do I think they should be doing? They need, they, they both like, structurally want to be building for the future and practically need bodies right now. So, a loan for a talented player who we got a small chance of retaining, I guess it kind of makes sense.
If it were a normal loan with option where you really do own all the upside. Like, because that's the thing that Tottenham were doing when they were signing him for a $50 million transfer fee. That's a very large transfer fee for a player with as much uncertainty as Tell. I think the justification of it for Tottenham that I basically buy is that Tottenham have a lot of money.
Tottenham do not need to, Tottenham can like, Tottenham can let efficiency go a little bit so long as they are buying upside. What they need are players who in three, five years could be stars when Son is definitely done and they probably don't have anyone else on the team who's likely to be a star at that point. Like maybe a center back, maybe one of the 18-year-olds, like no one who has that level of projection. And not his Tell has that level of projection in a few years with his technical abilities.
Not definite. And so 50 million is a lot to pay for not definite, but Spurs are in a place where buying upside makes sense. The problem is it's not clear how much of his upside they actually bought. I don't know.
That's a lot of talk from a guy who's like, not great yet. And maybe not even going to be anything more than a six-month loan. But that's the day of the transfer deadline, so you know, so be it. Regardless of how good he is, the saga was amazing.
Yeah, it was really good. I mean, it was clear. I mean, it was clearly like a lot of people trying to work together to piece Tell to just like really good Tottenham. Right, so yeah, I mean, I figure he's going to start getting sub minutes.
Probably start some Spurs do actually have a layoff in their schedule coming up because they did make top eight in Europa. So they, they skipped the midweeks. So it's just, I assume they'll probably like maybe come off the bench against Liverpool this week. It's not clear to me exactly when he's gonna be playing a lot.
We'll see. I mean, I think there's a lot of Premier League games over the second half of the season, which will mean relatively little. So should we mention, discuss any of the other Tottenham moves? There isn't that much to say.
They, Drag Machine is out for the year with an ACL and they brought in a replacement from Lantz, who's also a right-footed center back. I don't know. Yeah, I don't have anything else to say about it. That is what happened.
And so what this means is that Tottenham are still quite thin. They did bring in, they did not actually add a defender because Drag Machine is out. Right, although Van der Ven is back. We'll see.
Well, he's back at least for a little bit. I mean, this is the thing and Romero's not fully back yet. It may turn out that the story of this window for Tottenham is not signing another defender rather than all of the drama around Matisse Tell. I mean, the drama around Tell is fun, but like one thing I gotta say is Spurs apparently had a lot of money to spend and they managed to not really spend it.
This is, this is now two windows under Johan Lange where that has been the case. And it's not great. What I always think of is like being in a fantasy baseball draft and you miss on a bunch of the players you had like locked in. It's like, I think I can get value on these being players and you don't.
And then suddenly what you have to do is get every player in the $25 range, even the ones where you don't think you're getting value. And that's where Tottenham are heading to in the next window. Maybe Tell works out at like the right level of goodness where it makes sense for them to sign him and he will say yes. If he doesn't, they're looking at a central, a big central midfield signing, having to redo the attacker signing.
Are they going to really think, is, is, are Romero and Van der Ven going to be locked in as the starters? They have to get a center back? Like, and then you really have to worry about efficiency. It's, it's the same situation when you don't spend, when you are unable to spend money that you have for needs.
You need to start dialing back your requirements of efficiency at some point, but that's not a good thing to do either. Like this is the situation that Tottenham are in. Sure. All right.
Well, we will be back with more podcasts. There was a whole lot that happened. There was some stuff that happened that has like geopolitical implications. So you know, the double pivot is on at patreon.com slash double pivot.
We'll see you