Baz reporting this morning that "Puerta is understood to have returned to Bayer Leverkusen". Again, strange wording, surely it's not difficult to find out rather than saying "it's understood"
I don’t know any other profession where you automatically return to your previous employer with your previous salary and contract intact if it doesn’t work out at your new employer for whatever reason. If I leave my job and get a new one in a different country but after a few weeks it turns out I can’t work for my new employer, I don’t get my old job and salary back by default.
Would the PFA not step in on this, you’d think they’d be all over this. Two of their members can’t continue to work through no fault of their own. (I get they are getting paid but they aren’t playing). Potentially having an effect on their careers
The only thing they’re helping is themselves. If the rules say they can’t be registered, but they break their own rules and allow us to register them anyway. You can see there could be no end of implications with regards promotion/relegation. Maybe Puerta scores the winner away at Charlton, relegating them and making us mathematically safe. So I don’t think they can just turn around and allow us to register them, they have to follow their own rules.
They are not being restricted from working. They're just nulling this particular move as it involves a fee we can't pay. Puerta has gone back and they're trying to work something out for Reda, but if that fails, he'll go back too.
You'd normally get a new job, then hand in your notice when you had a formal offer and start date. Completely different scenario. In this case the transfer was never completed.
But we paid money to bring SJ to the club and he isn't being sent back. An employee is an employee and it doesn't make sense how the EFL can stop you from employing an individual. But it's also very possible that Baz has it wrong
We weren't under a fee restriction when we appointed the coach, and didn't have to wait until a transfer window to register him and for the deal to be ratified. And no, Baz hasn't got it wrong.
Not really though. The EFL can't stop us from paying fees, but they can stop us from registering players and clearly we still want to be able to register players. Whilst it's similar to Barca, they had La Liga by the balls so they'll always be more lenient. There's no way we can just send Puerta back when the obligation was triggered without Leverkusen & Puerta agreeing. It's got shades of the Leeds and Jean Kevin Augustin case. But if the transfer has been set aside, why has it not been communicated? It's as clear as day that the EFL don't trust Acun at all mind. And I can't imagine trying to circumvent rules to sign Frigan went down well.
Is it really as simple as it's their rules and they have to follow them blindly? I can see the logic in that on relation to 'we missed a payment(s) by X days = 3 window ban pending appeal'. But then surely the appeal hearing and resultant outcome was the time to consider fully the full facts and come out with a sensible, appropriate sanction(s). Refusing to register the 2 payers we'd already contracted to buy doesn't seem sensible nor appropriate and creates a lose-lose-lose all round, helping literally nobody.
Puerta has gone back. Transfer null and void. Argue and speculate all you like, won't change the fact.
I was wondering if clubs under an EFL fee restriction could sign players that cost a fee but just not register them until the fee restriction was over, similar to Barça signing Vidal and Turan in summer 2025 but not allowed to register them until January 2026. If that’s not the case, then why? Surely the whole point of a fee restriction is a punishment for breaking the rules i.e. gaining an unfair advantage over other clubs. If you can still sign players but not register them for three windows, surely that’s the punishment itself? I guess the other argument is that the EFL are concerned about our finances and their intervention through embargoes and fee restrictions is ‘saving us from ourselves’ rather than purely punitive but I just don’t buy it. The EFL doesn’t actually care if clubs are well-run or even competitive; they only care if clubs can fulfil fixtures. Hypothetically, if we could sign Frigan this summer for £6 million but can’t play him for 18 months, it doesn’t actually give us a competitive advantage for the duration of the fee restriction. This is how the embargoes work under other governing bodies. They’re ‘registration embargoes’. Technically, clubs can still buy however they please but they just can’t register them for competitions.
But it’s not actually been announced though, has it? There’s been no official statement by City or Leverkusen that Puerta is returning to Leverkusen. There’s a week left of the transfer window and it still hasn’t been announced. If you look anywhere which lists squad lists, Puerta is a Hull City player. Transfermarkt, FotMob, Sofascore and even City’s website all list him as a Hull City player. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd? The only person saying he’s going, or gone back, to Leverkusen is Baz Cooper.
