The Los Angeles Dodgers are baseball's answer to the question: "What if Manchester United were one of the smartest clubs in the world?"
In 2014, the Dodgers hired Andrew Friedman, something of a Billy Beane 2.0, away from the Tampa Bay Rays, something of an Oakland A's 2.0, to be their president of baseball operations. Friedman helped build a Rays team that made the World Series in 2008 and consistently featured in the playoffs despite running one of the lowest payrolls in the league.
The Dodgers hadn't won a World Series since 1988, but they lured Friedman away by making him the highest-paid executive in the sport -- and then giving him a ton of money to spend. Over the past eight years, Los Angeles has built up one of the league's biggest analytics departments, created one of baseball's top farm systems, developed an impressive track record of improving flawed players, and spent as much money on salaries as just about any other team. They finally won it all in 2020, and they're pretty much the favorites to win the World Series every season at this point. That trend doesn't seem likely to change any time soon, either: They began the current season with a league-record $310.6 million payroll and still have one of the league's five-best collections of prospects, according to MLB.com.
That all probably sounds pretty good to Chelsea fans, but at least for now, the Premier League club's new owner, Todd Boehly, hasn't hired another Friedman to overhaul the latest sports team in his ownership portfolio. No, he's currently serving as his own Friedman. In the same statement detailing the departure of longtime director Marina Granovskaia last week, the club announced that Boehly would be its interim sporting director.
A handful of early reports suggest that Boehly wants to exploit a mechanism that his baseball team frequently uses but soccer teams almost never do: player trades. All of which raises a question that perhaps even Boehly himself is wondering: Why don't Premier League clubs trade their players more often?
Well, because trades don't exist
In most American sports, players can be traded whether they like it or not. While a small number of stars have "no-trade" clauses negotiated into their contracts, the majority of players can be traded from one team to another, so long as their contract fits into their new team's roster in a way that doesn't violate the league's salary cap structure.
"In order to move a player in European football, it requires player consent," said Jake Cohen, a sports lawyer. "So a player has to agree to any transfer, whether that be permanently or on loan, which makes it a little more difficult for teams to move players as they do in American sports. In European football, it's mandatory that players consent to move, and that's not something that can be negotiated away. That's sort of a fundamental right guaranteed by FIFA."
For example, the Dodgers acquired MVP outfielder Mookie Betts from the Boston Red Sox (owned by Fenway Sports Group, the owners of Liverpool) via trade in early 2020. They then signed him to a 12-year, $356m extension that employs him through 2032, when he'll be 40 years old. Betts' contract does not have a no-trade clause, so if for some reason the Dodgers eventually decide to trade him to, say, the Kansas City Royals, then Betts won't be able to do anything about it. He'll still get paid the same amount, just by a new team. Hope you like barbecue.
Compare that to the Romelu Lukaku situation. Not only did Chelsea pay Inter Milan a transfer fee of $124.3m to acquire the player in 2021, they then gave Lukaku a five-year contract worth around $85m in total. If the soccer world operated under the same conditions as MLB, perhaps Chelsea could have traded Lukaku for some other star player this summer, but they still would have had to find a team that wanted to acquire Lukaku at that same contract. Instead, Lukaku first had to agree to move to Inter Milan on loan for a season, and then Chelsea and Inter Milan had to separately negotiate a loan fee.
What about swap deals?
So, yes, there have been what the European soccer world refers to as swap deals, where two players exchange teams, typically with an extra monetary amount being paid by the team who is acquiring the more valuable player. In 2009, Inter Milan and Barcelona swapped Samuel Eto'o and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, with the Catalan club paying an extra €45m to acquire the Swede. In 2011, Chelsea acquired David Luiz by paying €20m and sending Nemanja Matic, who would rejoin Chelsea three years later, to Benfica. In January of 2018, Manchester United swapped Henrikh Mkhitaryan for Alexis Sanchez, and the pair were reportedly considered equally valuable by both clubs because Sanchez's deal expired at the end of the season. And most recently, in 2020, Juventus paid €12m to acquire Arthur (valued at €72m) from Barcelona while sending Miralem Pjanic (€60m) the other way.
Again, it's important to remember that these moves only happened because all of the players agreed to leave their current clubs and sign new contracts with their new teams.
"When there's a transfer, it's usually a player moving in exchange for money, and there's a couple negotiations going on," said Cohen. "There's the negotiation between the buying club and the selling club over the value of the player, or what the transfer fee is going to be. And there's a second negotiation going on concurrently between the buying club and the player over what the player's new employment contract is going to look like."
This is why so many transfers fall apart and become grist for the rumor mill: Two negotiations have to succeed. Let's just hypothetically say there's a 50-50 chance that any given negotiation is successful. Then the likelihood of a given transfer coming to fruition -- the two clubs agree and the player and his new club agree -- would be just 25%. (For the non-math-inclined out there: 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25.) If you're doing a swap deal, you now need four separate negotiations to work out, and that drops the likelihood of success in our hypothetical world down to just 6%.
"Instead of two concurrent negotiations going on, you now have four concurrent negotiations going on," said Cohen. With Player A, you have the negotiation between the buying club and that player's value. With Player B, you have a second negotiation over what that player's value is. You need the two clubs to agree to what the valuations are and how they're going to offset each other. Then, Player A and Player B both need to agree to new contract terms to their respective new clubs."
However, there's also a fifth and sixth variable on both sides.
"If agents get wind that there's a potential player swap in the mix, they're going to attempt to leverage that for the benefit of their own player," Cohen said. "They know that, 'Oh, if Player A is moving, then Player B is the key to this whole thing so we want a 20% increase in the overall compensation package.' If Player B doesn't move, that impacts the potential of Player A to move."
On top of all the transactional complications, there's also just a simple question of logic beneath all of this. None of the major American sports leagues have more than 32 teams. If you're a top team, then about one-third of those teams aren't going to trade with you because you're a competitor. And another third of those teams probably don't have players you want. So, there's only a small subset of professional baseball/football/basketball teams that have players you'd be willing to try to acquire.
In the soccer world, there are literally hundreds of other teams that you could theoretically sign valuable players from. The two best teams in the Premier League, Liverpool and Manchester City, just landed two players (Darwin Nunez, €75m, from Benfica and Julian Alvarez, €17m, from River Plate) from teams that don't even belong to the five biggest leagues in Europe, while Real Madrid brought Champions League-winning goal scorer Vinicius Junior in from Brazilian side Flamengo for €45m in 2018. Given all of that, what are the chances that the best player Chelsea could acquire for a given amount of money plays for a team that feels the same way about one of the players Chelsea currently employs but also would be willing to get rid of?
If the club's new ownership wants to remain competitive atop the Premier League without the massive transfer losses that Roman Abramovich funded every year, Chelsea are going to need to get more value out of the money they spend on signing players. Limiting your potential acquisition pool to transfer listed players on teams who would also want your players just isn't the way to get the most out of what you spend. It's not how the Dodgers won the World Series, and it's probably not how whoever Boehly hires to replace himself will do business either.