Control is an illusion for most professional footballers but we only figure this out as May melts into June.
Across 17 seasons I moved clubs eight times, never staying anywhere longer than four years, even going out on loan twice in 2011 to remain in Giovanni Trapattoni’s Euro 2012 plans. But that’s another column.
From earning £29.50 a week in Preston North End’s youth team to how my career panned out, I can hardly complain. Young without ever being naive, I earned another £40 a month claiming a bus pass despite living 400 metres from the training ground.
My breakthrough season in 1996 was dissimilar to Evan Ferguson’s meteoric rise in 2023. For starters, I signed a professional contract at 18 worth £95 a week.
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One year deal. Make or break. Within two months I was impacting games, so my money was doubled and repackaged into a two-year agreement. We won the old third division and I was flying.
Around Christmas a bid came in from Sheffield United. To keep me at Deepdale, I was offered a five-year deal worth £350 a week, but the circumstances around signing on the dotted line proved traumatic.
Summoned to the office of manager Gary Peters, I was given one option. Sign the contract. Here I was, a kid without strong parental influence, in football terms, or an agent.
Feeling enormous pressure, I scribbled my name before walking home with a knot in my stomach. It was not how I dreamt that moment turning out. The top earner at the club was on around £1,100 a week with the rest getting between £700 and £900.
Turns out this was how business got done. Teenager in a man’s world, I learned from that moment.
This can be the most stressful time of year for players as their career path passes into other peoples’ hands. Even those under long term, lucrative contracts are susceptible to the financial state of their club, and to the man or woman responsible for balancing the books.
During the season you feel less like a pawn, simply by running onto the pitch every Saturday afternoon. You are influencing your future earnings by playing well, but you are also turning heads and when you become a valuable asset you will be sold to the highest bidder.
Football is a fickle business at the best of times, but early summer, when all I ever wanted to do was to play for Ireland at a major tournament, the agent or the gaffer (or both) always seemed to call.
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Nobody is above the snap decisions of an ambitious club chairman reassessing his squad before the transfer market reopens; the champions cannot stand still; the relegated must rebuild after an inevitable fire sale; the promoted have to launch a spending spree to avoid being the former within 12 months. Brighton, for example, need reinforcements if they are to win the Europa League.
And so on.
From an Irish perspective, Gavin Bazunu will take stock before his second season at Southampton, having lost his place to Alex McCarthy as the club finished rock bottom of the Premier League. Same goes for Nathan Collins, who did not start a game for Wolves from January 22nd until last week’s draw with Everton.
If you think their next move is crucial, spare a thought for Liverpool’s Caoimhín Kelleher or Shane Duffy at Fulham. Premier League players in all but activity, they shared 17 minutes of pitch time this season. Kelleher accounting for zero of those minutes.
International careers are at stake but more pressingly for Kelleher and especially Duffy, who is 31, their future at the top level demands immediate action.
After a while players realise that control is an illusion. A big move can quickly turn to dust. English football waits for nobody to mature, you come ready at 20, 21 or get paid to warm-up and warm down.
At least Evan Ferguson penned a new deal a few weeks ago, but say the Glazers sell Manchester United to Qatar’s Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani and Erik ten Hag wants Ferguson to lead the line at Old Trafford – who is going to block that deal?
You can only control how you behave in each situation. By the end of my second season at Preston I’d broken into the Ireland under-21s and a few Premier League clubs were interested. West Brom offered a club record of £1.25 million to bring me to The Hawthorns.
This was not a smooth transition. I’d an agent by then but Peters told me to put in a transfer request. This would allow the club to frame my departure as ‘Kilbane requests departure from boyhood team’ rather than ‘Preston sells local lad for profit’.
“I’m not signing a transfer request,” I told Peters, “Why should I?”
The hairdryer treatment was not the sole domain of Alex Ferguson.
Now 20, and remembering the non-negotiation of two years previously, I stood my ground. Next day I met my agent at a service station down the M6 motorway. This was how it used to be. David Moyes was Preston’s assistant player coach at the time, and he met us there.
“Gary is going to call and ask you to sign a transfer request,” he said before adding, “The club has accepted the offer.”
In my mind, the stakes were ridiculously high. I’d just had surgery, which ruled me out of Brian Kerr’s under-20 squad that went to the World Cup semi-finals in Malaysia. Mick McCarthy was about to name me in the senior Ireland squad but in that moment, with the smell of petrol and sound of articulated lorries rumbling past, I feared that my career could stagnate.
Phone rings. Moyesy passes it over. “All the best with the move Kev,” said Peters. “Make sure you sign that transfer request.”
“Okay then, I am quite happy to play for Preston next season,” I countered.
“No, no. Go meet [West Brom manager] Ray Harford.”
Eventually, I caved, signing the transfer request and moving on with my life but the record shows that I chose to leave my home-town club.
May into June, let me tell you, this stuff still happens. Probably not at a Shell station in Limboland but you can be sure Spurs chairman Daniel Levy is shopping Harry Kane around for £100 million before his contract expires in 2024.
Now is the time to flog the most marketable kid and sign two or three veterans in his stead. The worst part of it nowadays is the conflict of interest created by clubs employing agents to tie-up these deals in a neat little bow. Players are rarely given a choice. It’s murkier than ever.
Know your worth is the only advice I can pass on. Take the West Brom to Sunderland move in 1999. Middlesborough had been sniffing around but my fate was sealed by West Brom’s precarious financial position rather than the form of a young left winger. There were wage issues month-to-month so Peter Reid’s £2.5 million offer was quickly accepted.
Without my knowledge, West Brom had been actively looking for bids. This hurts a fragile mind, until you realise this is the game played by most clubs and almost every agent.
Moyes treated me like a person, rather than a commodity, when making a logical business decision to shift me from Everton to Wigan in 2006 but these moves tend to bleed into massive international windows, like what happened before we lost 1-0 in Germany.
Life in Limboland will distract a few Irish lads before the Greece game on June 16th. Stephen Kenny knows this is part of the job. One minute you are flying high, winning player of the season at Wigan, reborn at wing back, the next thing you know the club is cashing in on your waning value before your contract ends.
I was 32 by then, well beyond the point of negotiating with any leverage. Steve Bruce ran the numbers, offering half my then salary to re-sign. Fullback-midfield-winger, break-in-case-of-emergency. Another tense standoff at the precise moment I needed to unwind.
Hull City came in, offering an incredible 2½-year contract in the 2009 January window that kept me in the Premier League.
It’s a cold business that sometimes works out for the player but mostly leaves you sipping mank coffee off the M6, hoping that a higher power isn’t bluffing while using your future as chips.
