As Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Kane have experienced in recent seasons, players can’t always get the transfer they want unless they have a release clause in their contract....CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE>>>
Kane wanted to go to Manchester City in 2021, but his current club Tottenham Hotspur insisted. The England striker without a buyout clause struggled to push through a transfer and a year later Pep Guardiola’s men signed Erling Haaland instead.
Ronaldo was desperate to leave Manchester United this summer after his current employers failed to qualify for the Champions League.
Atletico Madrid, Napoli and Sporting Lisbon were some of the clubs that failed to prise the player away from Old Trafford as the Portuguese international had no exit clause in his contract.
High-profile players are increasingly negotiating minimum compensation clauses in the contracts they sign with clubs and ensuring that these are set at a realistic level.
Such a step ensures that if the team wishing to buy the player pays the required transfer fee – which in some cases can only be triggered on or after a certain date – the offer is automatically accepted and negotiations on personal terms begin.
This is a step that is often of interest to younger players. For example, they may join a club in the first division and hope to be successful enough to earn a transfer to even bigger teams such as Barcelona, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Chelsea, Man City and Man Utd, if they are successful enough.
Their current clubs may not want to sell the star player and will try to discourage these top teams by valuing the player highly.
In the Premier League in particular, many clubs, even those in the middle or bottom of the table, have considerable financial strength to hold on if a top club comes along, so a release clause can be a powerful tool.
However, release clauses are not limited to players who are on the rise.
Haaland and his agents also negotiated a buyout clause when he joined Man City in 2022.
Haaland has an opt-out clause that takes effect in the summer of 2024 and is worth €200 million, which should encourage Madrid to sign him.
The Norwegian superstar then has a second opt-out clause for a minimum fee, which comes into effect in the summer of 2025 and is worth €175 million.
City would not have been able to prevent Haaland’s departure if they had received a transfer offer that matched the amounts from those dates, but they can’t complain too much – they only paid €60 million after they had also matched the release clause in his contract with Borussia Dortmund, which was activated at the end of last season.
In some leagues, such as La Liga, the rules and tradition is that every player has a release clause in his contract, so in some cases clubs have set it too high to deter potential buyers.
In Barcelona, Lionel Messi was given a contract in 2009 that included a buyout clause of €250 million, a sum that was unaffordable at the time.
This sum was later increased to a whopping €700 million when he signed another new contract at Camp Nou in 2017. This was in response to PSG having paid €222 million for Neymar’s opt-out clause, a sum that was also considered too high for anyone to pay.
More recently, Madrid and Barca have even begun to set some opt-out clauses as high as €1 billion! The Catalans have seven such players who have turned these astronomical prices on their head, the latest being teenage sensation Gavi in midfield.
Clubs often try not to include these clauses in their contracts.
Recently, RB Leipzig managed an impressive feat by tying star player Christopher Nkunku to a new contract that did not include the €60 million buyout clause that the player had originally requested.
This article, according to FootballTransfers, has compiled a list of some of the most famous players in world football who should have an opt-out clause in their contract.
