Written by Finn Löwik of jj
When you are a young professional you want the best and when you have the chance to get the best you do not hesitate to grab that opportunity. This is a golden rule for any professional career.
People are pleased with the chances you get and congratulate you with your move. It is not so in the world of sports.
Recently we have had some heated discussions about what is reasonable and what is not. Ethics in the world of sports, the most contradicting term but, as I am naive and believe in a situation where everybody can be good to each other, I have come to terms and support the idea.
When a transfer is made it will be done in public and if you do it in the back alleys behind a shroud of darkness you are likely to be exposed.
The rule however is that a transfer should hold a fair price. A fair price is a price that is decent for both the seller and the buyer. When there is no agreement there is no deal, one party could not decide if the fair price offered for his services was fair enough.
So far, so good.
But what if you | | want to strengthen your squad and have a nice rider in sight. You contact the team owning the rider and start negotiations. Of course you do not want to start giving your highest offer. You are not silly. You give him your first offer and the other team with counter it. In the end you agree on selling and buying the rider for the fair price. Not too much for the buyer and not too little for the seller. There is an agreement. The problem in the world of sport is, there are not two parties involved in a transaction. The complete community is involved.
And thus the fair price is not a fair price between two parties completing a business agreement but a popularity quest. When you are popular you can get a more fair price than if you are not. More teams will likely to feel left out and complain about the deal you have made. Your impopularity will mean most of the competition will deny you your deal and you are left out with nothing, if you are lucky and, with less if you are impopular to the bone.
This will happen when a rider is sold, too low in the eyes of the competition. You have strengthen your squad with a great rider and still have money left to make another
| | great acquisition.
But what if there is a manager that wants to strengthen his squad and contacts another manager to buy one of his riders and the manager offers a transaction that exceeds your wildest dreams. The other manager is willingly parting of his rider for a price that is welcomed and maybe even pushed higher depending on the greed of the manager in situ. This also results in a price that is fair, because two parties agree on a price. The difference however with above mentioned is that we have a price that is too high. Nobody will argue that, nobody will outbid that and everybody will think, I can get better for less.
And here we are having an issue. A beneficial deal is always beneficial when other people than the parties involved, buyer and seller, feel they are left out. And never beneficial when a deal could hold future benefits. You always want to sell high and buy low. And this means you will always argue on a, in your eyes, beneficial deal that is too low but, never a deal that is too high.
Ethics in sports, even those are questionable.
|