Transfer Request in Football: What It Does and Costs

A transfer request in football is a written notice from a player who is under contract, asking his club to let him go. It gives him no right to leave, it does not shorten or suspend his contract, and the club is free to refuse it. Its real effect in England is on money: under the league rules on signing-on fees, and under the way most loyalty bonuses are drafted, a move that follows a player's own written request can cost him payments he would otherwise have collected. Everything else about it is leverage, timing and public relations.

Fernando Torres showed all of that in a single week. On 27 January 2011 he put a request in writing to Liverpool, and Liverpool rejected it. Four days later, on deadline night, he was a Chelsea player for £50 million, then a British record. The letter had not made the transfer happen. It had made it the player's idea.

What a transfer request actually is in English football

Strip away the headlines and the document is modest. A player, or more often his agent on his behalf, writes to the club secretary or the chief executive saying that he wishes to be placed on the transfer list or to be allowed to leave. Some are a paragraph. Some are a single line in an email. There is no prescribed form in the Premier League Handbook or the EFL Regulations, no deadline for lodging one and no procedure the club must follow on receiving it.

What the club receives is a statement of intent. Nothing more.

The player's contract continues on every term. He is still required to train, to play when selected, to behave as the standard contract requires and to turn up on the first day of pre-season. The club still owes him his basic wage every week, his appearance money when he plays and any bonus the team earns. If the club does nothing at all, the request sits in a file and the contract runs to its expiry date, at which point the player is free anyway and the question goes away.

So why does anyone bother? Three reasons, and they overlap:

• It forces the matter into the open, which can bring a buying club to the table at a lower price than the seller wanted.
• It moves responsibility for the departure, in the eyes of supporters, from the board to the player.
• It can be used at the negotiating table as the threat behind a demand for a better contract, with the player's real aim being to stay on improved terms.

The third use is common enough that a request is often read, correctly, as an opening position. Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney both signed new deals within days of making it public that they wanted out, and neither episode was an accident of timing.

What the request does	What it does not do
Records in writing that the player wants to leave	End, suspend or shorten his contract
Can trigger contract clauses on signing-on fees and loyalty pay	Oblige the club to accept any offer
Shifts the public story of a sale onto the player	Excuse him from training or playing
Gives a buying club a reason to bid	Allow him to talk to other clubs without permission

A transfer request has nothing to do with a release clause. A release clause is a figure written into the contract at signing, and a club that offers it can, depending on the wording, open talks without the selling club's agreement. A request has no figure attached and opens nothing. The two are covered separately on our release clause guide, and the distinction matters because the two are confused in reporting every summer.

The money a written request can cost a player

The cost comes from the way English football pays the large lump sums in a contract. A signing-on fee is not paid on the day the player signs. Under the Premier League and EFL rules it is spread across the contract in instalments, usually equal ones, paid at points through each year of the deal. A player who signs a five-year contract with a substantial signing-on fee therefore has most of it still to come for most of the contract.

Unpaid signing-on instalments

The leagues' rules protect those instalments when a club sells a player who wanted to stay. If the club initiates the move, the outstanding instalments are generally still owed, and the buying club and the player's agent build that into the negotiation. The protection falls away when the move follows the player's own written transfer request. In that case the unpaid instalments are at risk, and the selling club will usually argue they are forfeit.

The exact wording sits in each league's handbook, is reissued every season, and has been amended over the years; a reader who needs the clause for a dispute should read the current edition rather than rely on a summary. The principle has been stable for decades. A player who asks to go loses the right to the money he was being paid for staying.

Loyalty payments

Loyalty bonuses are a matter of contract drafting rather than league rules, and they are usually written more tightly still. A typical clause pays a fixed sum on a set date, or at the end of each season, provided the player is still registered with the club and has not submitted a written request to leave. Hand in the letter and the condition fails. Some contracts go further and make a loyalty payment conditional on not having agitated for a move in public, which is harder to prove and therefore rarer.

Why agents keep it off paper

Put those two together and a player on a long contract with a large signing-on fee can be risking a sum that dwarfs a season's wages. The agent's standard advice follows: say it in a meeting, say it to the manager, let it leak, but do not write it down. The buying club often makes the same point to the player's side, because a forfeited instalment is money the player will then ask the buying club to replace.

1. 1Club sells without a written requestUnpaid signing-on instalments are normally still owed to the player
2. 2Player lodges a written requestUnpaid instalments are put at risk under the league rules on signing-on fees
3. 3Loyalty clause conditional on no requestThe payment is cancelled once the request is on file
4. 4Basic wage while still at the clubPaid in full until the day the registration transfers
5. 5Buying club negotiatesOften asked to cover what the player has given up

A simplified outline of the usual position under English league rules and typical contract drafting; the current handbook and the individual contract govern any real case.

The basic wage is never in question. Until the day his registration moves, the player is paid as normal. The cost of a request is all in the deferred money, which is exactly where a player on a big contract keeps most of it.

Why the request has to be written down

Plenty of players tell their manager they want to go. Very few of them have handed in a transfer request.

The difference is evidential. A conversation in the manager's office, however blunt, leaves no document that the league rules or the contract can bite on. The signing-on fee provisions and the loyalty clauses refer to a request in writing because only a written request can be produced later in an argument about who wanted the move. If a player says out loud that he would like to join a bigger club, and the club then sells him, the player can still say the club sold him; his outstanding instalments are, on that version, owed.

This creates one of the odder games in English football. Each side wants the other to own the departure on paper.

The club's interest is clear. If it can get the player to put his wish in writing, the sale costs less, because the outstanding signing-on money may not have to be paid, and the board can tell supporters truthfully that the player asked to go. Clubs have been known to tell a player that a bid will only be considered once a written request is lodged. That is a negotiating tactic, not a rule, and an agent will usually resist it.

The player's interest runs the other way. He wants the move and the money. So he will make his position plain in every medium except a letter. He may refuse to discuss a new contract. He may let it be known through friends in the press that he feels unsettled. He may tell the manager privately that his head has gone. None of that, on its own, is a written transfer request.

When a statement does the job of a letter

The line blurs when a player issues a public statement. Rooney's statement in October 2010, released through his representatives, said he had told the club he would not sign a new contract and set out his reasons. It was not described at the time as a formal written transfer request, and whether a statement of that kind would trigger a loyalty clause depends on how that clause was drafted. Most clauses name a written request to the club, and a press statement is addressed to somebody else.

What a club can do once a request is on the desk

Three responses are open to the club, and the contract continues unchanged under each of them.

Accept it. The club confirms the player is available and invites offers. It may say so publicly, or leave the confirmation to briefings. The player has not been sold and has not been released; he has been placed on the market. If no acceptable bid arrives before the window closes, he is still the club's player, still under contract, and still expected in training. Accepting a request is no promise to accept any particular price.

Reject it. The club announces, or lets it be known, that the player is not for sale. This is the most common public response from a club that values the player and has years left on his contract, because the contract is the club's strongest asset in any later negotiation. A rejection does not prevent a later sale. It sets the terms on which one might happen.

Ignore it. The club acknowledges receipt, says nothing in public and carries on picking him. This is quieter than a rejection and leaves every option open, which is why boards with a sale already half in mind prefer it.

Club response	Contract status	Typical public line	Usual next step
Accept and invite offers	Unchanged	Player made available at his request	Bids considered through the window
Reject publicly	Unchanged	Player not for sale at any price	Price rises or the player stays
Ignore	Unchanged	No comment	Decision deferred to the club's timetable
Accept, then reject bids	Unchanged	Valuation not met	Request lapses at window close

The table's second column is the one that matters. Whatever the club says, the player's obligations do not change. He cannot refuse to play because his request was rejected, and if he does, the club's disciplinary procedure applies, which is covered further down.

A club can also respond by improving the contract on offer. Many requests are answered that way, and many are written in the hope that they will be. The negotiation then runs as it would have done anyway, with both sides knowing the player has shown his hand.

Timing shapes all of it. A request lodged in July has the summer window ahead of it, roughly two months of bidding. One lodged a week before the deadline gives a buying club a narrow chance and the seller a reason to hold firm. The window dates and the rules on deadline day are set out in our guide to Premier League transfer window rules.

Refused, then sold: Torres in 2011 and Coutinho in 2017

Liverpool provide the two cleanest cases in English football of a written request being turned down and the player being sold anyway, and the two cases ran on very different clocks.

Fernando Torres, January 2011

Chelsea's interest in Torres surfaced late in the January window. Liverpool rejected an opening bid. On 27 January, Torres submitted a written transfer request; the club rejected that too, and said so. The position held for four days. On 31 January, deadline day, Liverpool accepted a bid of £50 million and, within hours, agreed to buy Andy Carroll from Newcastle United for £35 million, using the money they had just received. Torres completed his move to Chelsea that night.

What did the request achieve? It removed any doubt that the player wanted the move, which made a bid of that size more likely. It also put the departure on the player in the eyes of supporters, and Torres's reception at Anfield thereafter reflected it. Liverpool's rejection did not stop the sale. It held the price up until a replacement was found.

Philippe Coutinho, August 2017

Coutinho's case ran for five months. Barcelona made bids in the summer of 2017. Liverpool's owners said publicly that no offers for him would be considered. On 11 August, Coutinho submitted a transfer request by email. Liverpool rejected it. The window closed with him still at Anfield, he returned to the side, and he played through the first half of the season.

In January 2018 Liverpool sold him to Barcelona. The rejection in August had cost the club nothing it could not recover, and the delay let the club sell at a moment of its choosing, in a window where it could plan around his absence. Coutinho's later inability to play in that season's Champions League for Barcelona, because he had already appeared in it for Liverpool, is a separate rule that our page on the cup-tied rule covers.

Player	Club	Request	Club's first answer	Outcome
Fernando Torres	Liverpool	27 January 2011, in writing	Rejected	Sold to Chelsea on 31 January 2011
Philippe Coutinho	Liverpool	11 August 2017, by email	Rejected	Stayed; sold to Barcelona in January 2018
Steven Gerrard	Liverpool	July 2005	Bid from Chelsea rejected	Withdrew within days and signed a new contract
Wayne Rooney	Manchester United	October 2010, public statement	Public pressure from the manager	Signed a new five-year contract within days

The pattern from the first two rows is consistent with how contracts work. A club holding a player on a long deal does not have to sell when asked, and the player's request mostly changes when the sale happens and on what terms. It rarely changes whether.

Withdrawn within days: Gerrard in 2005 and Rooney in 2010

The other documented pattern is the request that turns into a new contract.

July 2005. Liverpool were European champions, Chelsea wanted the captain, and talks over a new deal had stalled. Liverpool rejected Chelsea's bid and Gerrard handed in a transfer request. Within a day or so he had changed his mind, said he wanted to stay, and shortly afterwards signed a new contract. Whether the request was a genuine wish to leave that collapsed under the weight of what leaving would mean, or a lever to get talks moving, has been argued about since. Gerrard's own later account suggested real indecision. The negotiating effect was the same either way: the club was in no doubt about how close it had come to losing him, and the contract that followed reflected that.

October 2010 played out more publicly. Sir Alex Ferguson told a press conference on 19 October that Rooney had said he wanted to leave and that the club had done everything to keep him. Rooney's statement the following day explained he had asked for assurances about the club's ambition and had not received them. On 22 October he signed a new five-year contract, and the club's statement presented it as settled.

What a request achieves at the negotiating table

In both cases the player ended on improved terms at the same club. That outcome is not a law of nature, and some clubs, faced with what looks like a bluff, have accepted the request. But it explains why boards are wary of any player with a long contract and a large signing-on fee who is willing to make the threat. The request shows the player is prepared to forfeit deferred money; the improved offer is often calculated to make that unnecessary.

For a club, the calculation runs in three directions at once. It can lose a player it values. It can sell him for a fee that, with time left on the contract, is at its highest. Or it can pay more to keep him and set a precedent for the dressing room. A request accelerates that decision without settling it.

A note of caution. Neither Rooney's statement nor Gerrard's change of heart should be read as a template that works. Players have made the same move and been sold, and some have been left in the reserves for months. Our guide to pre-contract agreements covers the other exit, running the contract down, which costs a player nothing in instalments and costs the club the fee.

When a request turns into a strike

A rejected request leaves the player with a choice. He can accept it and play, or he can refuse.

Refusal takes several forms. Not reporting for training. Saying he is not in the right frame of mind to be selected. Declining to travel. Staying abroad after a holiday. Each is a breach of the standard contract, which requires the player to attend training and matches, to play to the best of his ability when selected, and to follow the club's reasonable instructions.

The disciplinary procedure

The standard Premier League and EFL contracts set out a disciplinary procedure the club must follow, with a hearing, a right for the player to be accompanied and a right of appeal. The penalties are limited. The best known limit is the cap on fines: for a single offence a club can fine a player no more than two weeks' basic wages, a limit agreed between the leagues and the Professional Footballers' Association and written into the contract. A club can also suspend a player, again within limits, and in the gravest cases of breach can seek to terminate the contract.

1. 1Request rejectedThe contract continues and the player is expected at training
2. 2Player refuses to train or playThe club records the absence as a breach of contract
3. 3Notice of a disciplinary hearingThe player is told the charge and may be accompanied
4. 4HearingThe club decides the breach and the penalty, within the contractual limits
5. 5AppealThe player can appeal through the route the contract sets out
6. 6Sale, settlement or returnMost strikes end with one of the three

The outline the standard English contract follows; time limits and the exact appeal route are set in the contract and league handbook in force at the time.

Why a strike rarely ends well

Dimitri Payet's departure from West Ham in January 2017 is the case English supporters remember. The manager said publicly the player had refused to play; within weeks he had been sold back to Marseille. The club got a fee, but for a player it had insisted it would keep, and the player left with his reputation in England shredded.

That is the usual shape. A strike forces a sale, so the player gets his move, but it signals to every buying club that the seller is desperate, which lowers the fee. It costs the player wages through fines, damages his standing with future employers and can lead to a disciplinary record that follows him. It costs the club the asset it was trying to protect. Neither side wins anything a calmer negotiation would not have given them.

Termination for breach is the extreme case and rarely used, because terminating a contract releases the player for nothing and invites a claim of its own. Clubs prefer to fine, sell or settle.

When the club wants the player gone instead

Reverse the situation. A club wants rid of a player he has no intention of leaving. Perhaps he is on high wages and out of the manager's plans, or perhaps the club needs to cut its wage bill to stay within the Premier League's spending limits.

The club cannot force him out. A transfer requires a new contract with the buying club, and nobody can sign that contract except the player. If he refuses to talk to the bidder, or refuses the terms, or simply prefers to see out his deal on the wages he already earns, the transfer fails. There is no mechanism in English football by which a club can sell a player without his agreement.

What the club can do is make staying less attractive, within the limits of the contract:

1. Transfer-list him. Announce he is available, which tells other clubs and tells the player where he stands.
2. Leave him out. Selection is the manager's decision, and a player has no contractual right to play. He can be kept out of the matchday squad indefinitely.
3. Train him apart. Separate training groups are common, though a player is entitled to proper training facilities, and a club that isolates a player in a way that looks punitive can face a grievance with the PFA's backing.
4. Exclude him from squad lists. A club with too many senior non-homegrown players may leave one off its registered Premier League squad, which stops him playing league matches for half a season.
5. Offer a settlement. Paying the player some or all of what remains on his contract to end it by agreement is the usual endgame, and our guide to mutual consent in football explains how those deals are struck.

Each step costs the club something. A player left out still draws his wage. A player kept off the squad list still draws his wage. A settlement is wages paid for nothing. The player's position is strong precisely because his contract is a contract, and the club signed it.

A player who is sold in these circumstances has not asked for the move in writing, so his outstanding signing-on instalments are not at risk on that ground. Buyers know this, and it is one reason a club trying to offload a well-paid player often finds the fee it can achieve is lower than it hoped. The selling club may be paying, in effect, to be rid of the remaining instalments.

Does a player get a cut of his own fee

At one time, yes, sometimes, and the rule turned on whether he had asked to leave.

The Football League's regulations entitled a player transferred between member clubs to a share of the fee, set as a percentage, provided he had not requested the transfer. A player who had lodged a request lost that entitlement. It was one more reason, long before signing-on fees were the large sums they are now, for a player to keep his wishes out of writing. The share was modest by modern standards and was paid in a period when wages were low, so it mattered.

In the Premier League era the player's reward from a move is negotiated rather than fixed, and anyone who needs to know whether a residual entitlement survives in the EFL should read the current EFL Regulations rather than a summary. What every domestic fee still carries is a levy. A deduction from transfer fees paid between English clubs goes towards the provident and pension arrangements run with the Professional Footballers' Association, so every domestic fee contributes, indirectly, to players' long-term security. The rate and the precise arrangements are set out in the league rules and have been revised over the years. The levy is paid by the clubs as part of the transaction, not taken from the player.

A modern player who wants a share of his own fee negotiates for it as part of his contract with the buying club. The buyer pays a signing-on fee, and the size of that fee is often argued with the transfer fee in mind. That is the closest equivalent now, and it is a matter of bargaining power rather than entitlement. The solidarity payments a buying club makes to a player's training clubs are a separate system again and go to clubs rather than to the player.

• 1961Maximum wage abolished
• 1963Eastham judgment on retain-and-transfer
• 1978Freedom of contract in the Football League
• 1995Bosman ruling

Years in which the rules on players' wages and movement changed. The 1995 entry is the Bosman ruling, which applied to cross-border moves within the European Union.

The request as a piece of theatre

A written request is a document, but it is often written for an audience other than its addressee.

The timing gives that away. Requests cluster in the last days of a window, when a buying club has a bid on the table and the selling club has the least time to find a replacement. A request lodged then is a statement that the player will not be content to stay, and it puts pressure on the board to take the money in front of it. Torres's request arrived four days before the deadline. Coutinho's arrived with three weeks of the window still to run, which is one reason Liverpool could hold out.

Then there is the statement to supporters. Some clubs announce a request themselves, sometimes within minutes of receiving it. That announcement is not a courtesy. It tells the fans whose idea the departure is. When a club later sells, it can point to the request and say the player wanted to go; the anger that might otherwise have landed on the board lands on the player instead.

Players and their representatives know this, which is why some issue statements of their own to set out their reasons. A player who says he wants to win trophies, or that the club has broken a promise, is trying to own the narrative before the club does. The supporters, broadly, do not believe either side, and judge by what happens on deadline day.

Who benefits from the paper

The board gains cover. A sale following a written request lets the chief executive say the club had no choice. The player gains a move, at a possible cost to his deferred money. The buying club gains a lower price than it would have paid for a player happy to stay. And the agent, whose fee is usually negotiated with the buyer, gains a completed deal. A request is the rare document that suits almost everybody involved except the supporters who wanted the player to stay.

The sell-on and instalment arrangements that then follow a sale are part of the transfer agreement between clubs and have nothing to do with the request; our page on how football transfer fees are paid sets out how those instalments work.

Before freedom of contract: when a request could be refused forever

For most of English football's history a refused transfer request meant exactly that, and there was nothing the player could do about it.

Under the retain-and-transfer system, a club could retain a player's registration at the end of his contract by offering him a new one on terms the rules allowed, and the player could not play for anyone else unless the club agreed to transfer him. A player who refused to re-sign was not free; he was simply unpaid. His only route out was to persuade the club to put him on the transfer list, and the club could decline. Combined with the maximum wage, which held all professionals to a single ceiling until 1961, the system kept a player tied to a club for as long as the club wanted him. Our guide to the maximum wage in football tells that half of the story.

George Eastham against Newcastle United

George Eastham was an inside-forward at Newcastle who asked to leave in 1959. Newcastle refused his request and retained his registration. Eastham declined to re-sign and stopped playing. Newcastle eventually agreed to sell him to Arsenal in 1960, but Eastham, backed by the players' union, pressed on with a High Court case against the system itself. In 1963 Mr Justice Wilberforce held that the retain element was an unreasonable restraint of trade.

The judgment did not end transfer fees and did not give players freedom at the end of their contracts overnight. It forced the Football League to reform the system, with an independent route of appeal for players who were retained against their will. Full freedom of contract, with a tribunal to set compensation where clubs could not agree, followed in 1978, and the Bosman ruling of 1995 removed fees for out-of-contract players moving between European Union countries. Our guide to the Bosman ruling and free transfers carries the longer account.

What changed for the transfer request is simple. Before Eastham, a request was a plea. After 1978, it became a negotiating position, because the player had a date on which he could walk away for nothing.

The transfer list then and now

The phrase "transfer-listed" is older than most of the clubs now using it. For decades the Football League circulated lists of players whose clubs had made them available, along with the fee each club was asking. A player who had requested a move, and been granted his request, appeared on the list. So did players the club simply wanted to sell. Managers scanned the lists for bargains, and a player's name on one was a public statement that his club would listen.

The formal lists faded as freedom of contract took hold and as clubs stopped advertising their asking prices. Nothing in the current Premier League or EFL rules requires a club to publish who it would sell.

What replaced them is less tidy:

• Agents' briefings. A player's representative sounds out clubs, explains that his client is available and suggests a price, all without anything written down. Much of what is reported as interest comes from this route.
• Club briefings. Clubs let it be known through journalists that a player can go, which serves as a transfer list addressed to every other club at once.
• Retained and released lists. Every summer the Premier League and the EFL publish which players each club has retained and which it has released, which tells the market who will be a free agent and, by omission, who is under contract.
• The PFA's lists of available players. The players' union circulates details of out-of-contract members looking for clubs, which serves the lower divisions in particular.

A modern player who wants a move does not need his name on a list. His agent will make sure everyone who matters knows. The written request survives as the one formal step left, and its formal consequences are almost all financial. That is why so few are written, and why the ones that are tend to arrive with the press release already drafted.

For the wider picture of how English football regulates the movement of players, the football hub gathers our guides to transfers, contracts and the rules behind them.