Matt Scott: Player trades boost third party balance sheets
“We are financial products. A football club is like a factory, and we are its outputs. You have to be realistic.”
It is not often you hear a human being reduce himself to the status of a balance-sheet item. But with these words that is exactly what Eliaquim Mangala, a France-international defender at the Portuguese champions, FC Porto, has done. Mangala’s words were in response to being confronted with the fact he is not merely an intangible fixed asset belonging to his club but also to two offshore funds whose investors’
