UEFA recently closed a loophole in its financial rules that allowed clubs to sign players to long contracts.
As The Times (subscription required) note, the Premier League have now followed suit, meaning that Chelsea, for example, are no longer able to take advantage of spreading the cost of transfer fees across a longer period.
Although that might be something of an inconvenience for the Blues and their owner, Todd Boehly, former super agent and Premier League co-creator, Jon Smith, believes the American was right to take advantage.
“Chelsea did what they did and I think it’s a very clever loophole that Todd Boehly found because he didn’t break any regulations,” Smith said in his exclusive column for CaughtOffside.
“On the playing field things don’t seem to have worked out, but he’s got a long time to make it happen.
“It was right to shut the loophole down because it was sort of an upside down Bosman.
“My desire as a football agent was to remove the shackles on footballers and let them have employment rights like everybody else.”
The likelihood is that with Boehly’s business nous, Chelsea will still be completely fine. The only spoke in the works if there is one, is that amortisation of players will continue as it had previously and before Boehly had got creative.
What the ruling does show is that there are rules there that can still be exploited if owners are clever enough.
As Smith noted, the American did nothing wrong and simply worked around the rules that were in place already without breaking them.
It’s just another example of a club looking to gain even a minuscule advantage over their contemporaries, such is the competitiveness at the elite level of the game these days.