Obligation to Buy: The Installment Contract Squeezing Small Football

In July, at a small training ground in Emilia-Romagna, I stood beside the sporting director of a mid-table Serie A club. He had just sold his favourite pupil to a giant, and a twelve-page contract lay on the table. He was not smiling. The contract was explicit: a two-season loan, with an obligation to buy once the player had made enough appearances. His club would lose the man today, but would only receive the money two years from now — provided he did not break a leg, did not lose form, and was not loaned out again somewhere else. I have covered eight World Cups and eight Olympic Games, but I had never seen a single sheet of paper turn joy into worry so fast.

The loan with obligation to buy — prestito con obbligo di riscatto in Italian — has existed for a long time. But over the past five years it has grown from an accounting trick into the backbone of the European transfer market. Its mechanics are so simple that people forget the real price. A big club pays a small fee to borrow a player for one or two seasons. When the conditions trigger — appearances, team results, or simply the contract term — the purchase becomes mandatory. The small club has no right to withdraw.

In August 2026, Sassuolo sent Manuel Locatelli to Juventus along exactly this template: a loan first, then an obligation to buy of about 37.5 million euros including add-ons. A year earlier, Fiorentina let Federico Chiesa join Juventus on a two-year loan with an obligation to buy beyond 50 million euros. Both deals were described by the media as "a success for both sides". Read the structure closely, and you find the opposite.

The reason big clubs favour the model lies in accounting and financial fair play. A transfer fee is not dumped into a single financial year; it is amortised across the length of the contract. Under the Premier League's Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) or UEFA's FFP, pushing a large outlay two years into the future is a safe way to duck the ceiling. Small clubs, needing cash now to pay wages, accept late payment. That mismatch in timing is where the gap is born.

In the Premier League, where I live and work, the model arrived later but is spreading fast. Mid-tier clubs have realised that a deal like this lets them keep a player for one more season and still get paid. The price is that they surrender control over their own future.

The summer after every World Cup or EURO is when the model explodes. A player who shines for a few games at a major tournament is instantly valued at triple, and his small club becomes the weakest link in the payment chain.

What I want to say is not about the metrics, but about power. When a mid-table club signs an obligation to buy, it stops being the seller. It becomes a warehouse keeper for a giant, carrying the risk while waiting to deliver.

Consider that risk. Between the start of the loan and the triggering of the obligation, the player remains under the big club's control. But if he tears a cruciate ligament — the kind of injury I have watched for forty years and still see clubs handle far too hastily — what happens? Depending on the clause, the small club may still be forced to sell, or may have to take back a player whose value has collapsed. The big club almost always has an exit; the small club almost always absorbs the loss.

Then there is so-called data analysis. Every major deal now comes with a report packed with metrics: minutes played, expected goals, pressing actions per 90 minutes. Looking at it, anyone would think the decision had been weighed thoroughly. But when I open those reports, I often find they say a great deal while concluding nothing. They describe what the player has done, without saying how the small club will live after losing him. A beautiful data sheet can hide an unjust structure.

I have read hundreds of these contracts. What catches my eye is not the large sums, but the small print: injury clauses, relegation clauses, clauses about a player refusing to sign personal terms. They are usually written in dry legal language, yet they decide the fate of an entire community.

In Italy, people even have a name for the phenomenon: plusvalenza, the profit from swapping players. Two clubs agree to value two players at artificially high prices, then trade them to book matching profits. The Turin public prosecutor's office has raised questions over a string of such deals in recent years. What is worth discussing is how pretty metrics are built to legitimise a fragile financial reality. The transfer market taught me: people buy hope, and sell memory.

I have sat in many press rooms where a manager talks about a "long-term project". I have also stood in many stadium corridors, listening to a data analyst admit that his report was skimmed by the board in five minutes. The analysis is not technically wrong. It is simply not used to understand, but to justify. Based on my experience following matches, that is the biggest blind spot of modern football: we have more data than ever, yet less verified truth.

People often tell me this model helps small clubs. That thanks to it, a mid-table club can finally sell a player at a high price, instead of losing him for nothing when his contract expires. It sounds reasonable. But flip the question: if it really were a bargain, why don't the big clubs just pay outright?

The answer lies in the fact that big clubs buy two things at once. They get the player immediately, and they keep the right to push the payment into the future. The small club loses the player immediately, gets the money later, and carries the risk throughout the interval. In essence it is a disguised loan dressed up in the word partnership. When I asked one sporting director why he still signed, he sighed: "Because if I don't sign, we have nothing left to sell."

I keep the rhythm for the team by recording even the things nobody wants to read. And what nobody wants to read this time is this: more and more small clubs are voluntarily turning themselves into farms that raise semi-finished products for the giants. I used to write on a typewriter; now I keep time with hashtags, but my heart still beats with the ball.

I am not writing this to convict anyone. I am writing because I believe a football ecosystem is only healthy when even the smallest clubs have a voice. If the coming major tournament season produces a few more stars and a few more installment contracts, perhaps it is time we asked ourselves: are we building football, or building a system that rents back the very people who make it?