Nagy & Damage Limitation

Adam Nagy's Bristol City exit a case of damage limitation as realities of the market hit home
The Hungarian will sign for Pisa this week, subject to with the Serie B side effectively taking his contract off Bristol City's hands

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"I think there's a re-calibration going on within the industry," was the phrase used by Nigel Pearson in early June in reference to the expectations and demands of agents in trying to execute transfer deals, but it so easily could have applied to other stakeholders in the game.

Clubs executives, managers, players, the media and fans, slowly but surely there's been a trickle down effect of knowledge and the realisation of how Covid-19 has affected the football industry.

On the face of it, the impact has been minimal; no clubs in England have gone under (at least not in an immediate sense), matches have taken places, fans have returned, season tickets have been purchased along with replica shirts, even a £100million transfer has taken place.

The last 18 months have been a bad dream, but not quite a full blown nightmare. And we're all starting to wake up again.

To many, conditioned by decades of fantasy-like spending, football in 2021 still feels the same; Premier League clubs are investing eight-figure fees and the summer transfer window narrative has, in a general and popular sense, been dominated by Harry Kane to here, Lionel Messi to there and Cristiano Ronaldo to everywhere.

Therefore, because most people who consume football as supporters aren't privy to the inner-workings of the industry, we - the media - have generally still presented a rough approximation of the past, plus football will forever represent a sense of escapism, there is an almost subconscious will for the old rules to still apply.

It's why confirmation of Adam Nagy's impending move to Serie B side Pisa this week was met with a mixture of bafflement and anger. The former because an international footballer has been permitted to leave a club with 12 months remaining on his contract for nothing and the latter due to the fact it seemingly points a dereliction of business duty on the part of Bristol City.

But Nagy's situation should be viewed more as the new normal rather than some kind of bizarre outlier.

In essence, yes, the approximate £2.5m the Robins spent on the Hungarian in 2019 to supposedly upgrade their midfield has been a bad investment. But the football economy two years ago with 2021 is not a fair comparison.

Nagy was purchased at what could come to be viewed as the final days of the Championship's boom in terms of spending; both in transfer fees and wages.

According to Transfermarkt.com (and, yes, they deal in educated estimates but it's the closest we can find to standardisation), the league's 24 clubs in the summer of 2019 spent a collective £215m, Bristol City making up £29.6m as the division's third-biggest spenders. For stark context, with six days remaining of the window, those figures now stand at £25.92m and £1.6m.

What City paid for Nagy in 2019 simply isn't relevant in today's market. However much it may seem how much an international midfielder off the back of an impressive showing at a major tournament should be worth, he isn't. Not anymore.

None of this could have been forecast when he arrived at Ashton Gate; aged 24 on a three-year deal. If he delivered, City - based on previous year's examples - could sell at a profit. If he failed, such was his reputation there would be a buyer on the continent able to cover some of the losses.

Covid has ripped up any best-laid plans that were made and, to look at the wider picture, analysing all City's business in that window, it's only Han-Noah Massengo and possibly Dan Bentley who represent value, in the sense that if they were sold, it would be likely be for a profit.

Across the Championship, of that £215m spent, the £7m+ spent on Kenneth Zohore and Krystian Bielik by West Brom and Derby looks terrible in the here and now. Admittedly influenced by injuries to the latter, but it didn't at the time.

The same can be said of the £11m Reading spent on George Puscas and Lucas Joao, the £5m Blackburn paid Southampton for Sam Gallagher, and the £4m Tommy Smith cost Stoke. We could go on.

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With the exception of Brentford (them again), striking gold with Bryan Mbuemo, Christian Norgaard, Ethan Pinnock and David Raya, for a combined £15m, it was a window littered with assets that have since completely tanked. Finding transfer deals that now represent good value is very difficult. Have a go, it's all in here.

Unfortunately with football's lack of transparency in publishing individual wages, and transfer fees is hard enough, we're unable to pinpoint specific contracts that were dished out, but safe to say it followed a similar trend.

It's because clubs were over-spending and increasingly losing sight of any mitigation against failure in the deals that were made. The pandemic has cut through that logic and exposed it for what it was.

That's worth of criticism, yes, but it's not specific to Bristol City, Mark Ashton, Steve Lansdown, Lee Johnson or anyone else. Everyone was at it, to varying degrees.

We all, at the time, wanted investment and City's business was mostly applauded. In normal circumstances, had the club twice missed out on the play-offs, Famara Diedhiou, Bentley, Nagy, Massengo and other could have been sold to balance the books. Niclas Eliasson would have certainly gone for far more than £3m.

But that safety net had been taken away and for nearly all clubs in the EFL now, it's a case of damage limitation, and Nagy is a case in point.

A player who wanted to leave (for wholly understandable personal reasons), who clearly wasn't in the manager's immediate first-team plans, with two players signed in his position who had worked with Pearson but with that exit route complicated by the new financial landscape.

Nagy's 2019 wages and contract appeared reasonably manageable in 2019 as a first-team star, but as a peripheral figure in 2021 and in light of the pandemic they were a burden too heavy for the club to bear.

The priority was as much getting that last year of salary off the books, as it was trying to extract some value from him, which, of course, couldn't be found

It's not like the club didn't want to sell him for a fee. Just like they didn't want to lose Diedhiou for nothing or Eliasson so cheaply. But when there are no buyers, literally no buyers, what are you to do? After all, players are only worth what clubs are willing to pay for them.

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With a week remaining of the window, the club could well have sat tight and hoped for someone to pick up the phone and offer something resembling a fee before August 31. But, after surveying the market, that was misplaced optimism.

And the reality was Pisa could have moved on and they'd be left with a player unhappy in Bristol, taking the final 12 months of his wages and offering little to no value to the first-team squad.

Pisa may be a Serie B side but are owned by Anglo-American billionaire Alexander Knaster who appears to be investing significantly, at least relative to his peers, since purchasing a 75% stake in January. It's unlikely many other Italian clubs even above that level in the lower mid-table of Serie A are able to match what is now a very good Championship wage.

There's also a morality issue at the heart of this, which wasn't a deciding factor but still comes into the equation; Nagy has a young family, he's living away from, and didn't want to be at his place of work in a country that has been largely alien to him since he moved here. Pisa have presented a three-year contract in a country where he feels comfortable.

It may not sit right with fans, and the subconscious emotional distance that is created with players, and maybe we're being naive to an extent, but it's admirable that City allowed the deal to take place in that context as opposed to effectively holding him against his will, which didn't benefit anybody involved.

Portsmouth manager Danny Cowley was widely praised last week when he said, with reference to Ipswich's decision to u-turn on a deal for winger Michael Jacobs: ''We in football all have a responsibility to remember that players are human beings and not pieces of meat.

"Football is just a great game, the greatest game in the world, but it can let itself down in terms of the way it treats people and, ultimately, for us as a football club we conduct ourselves in the right way. That's what we will always do."

City have done exactly that in the case of Nagy, granted with the additional "bonus" of saving on his wages which may or may not be used to re-invest in the first-team.

Previously that would have been a given but the sooner all of us appreciate the restrictions and challenges that now exist, and the boom of 2019 has given way to bust, perhaps the easier it will be to look forward.
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/sport/football/adam-nagy-bristol-city-market-5828668

 

'The league's 24 clubs in the summer of 2019 spent a collective £215m, Bristol City making up £29.6m as the division's third-biggest spenders. For stark context, with six days remaining of the window, those figures now stand at £25.92m and £1.6m.'

There is a contrast, in summer 2019 transfer window LJ spent nearly £30m, 3rd largest spend in the Championship, NP has spent £1.6m only in the current window with all of his inherited problems, bloody pandemic.

 

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Bit of fun in a sad world .