Wenger backs calls to regulate transfer fees

London: Arsene Wenger believes football’s transfer market is unsustainable in it’s current form and has backed governing bodies to take imminent action to limit transfer fees. Since the summer window closed at the start of the month, considerable political pressure has been building against rapidly rising transfer fees, with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Aleksander Ceferin, the Uefa president, both advocating greater central regulation of the transfer market. For years, Wenger has been an advocate of Uefa’s Financial Fair Play regulations, but backtracked in the wake of Neymar’s pounds 200 million move to Paris St-Germain, saying the regulations were useless in their current form. Expanding on those remarks, Wenger said “something will happen in the next 12 months” to limit rising transfer fees. “You have to go one of two ways,” he said. “Regulate it properly, or leave it completely open. But you cannot be in between. That is where we are. “That is only to the advantage of some clubs who can deal with rules in a legal way. The regulation has to be stricter and clearer, or open it completely: you can do what you want, provided you can guarantee you have the money to pay.” Merkel has become an outspoken critic of inflating transfer fees in recent weeks, as she runs for re-election. “Such sums are comprehensible to no one,” she told a German newspaper this week. “Uefa and Fifa should readjust the rules on transfers to ensure greater balance.” For his part, Ceferin recently offered suggestions as to how such regulations might work in practice. A salary cap is one idea, along with smaller squads, fewer loan deals and perhaps even a tax on transfers. “The German prime minister came out, the president of Uefa came out, and politically, I think something will happen in the next 12 months to regulate and limit the transfer amount,” Wenger said. He observed that one unforeseen consequence of spiralling transfer fees has been to make it harder for clubs to offload players, and harder for unhappy players under contract to force a move, leaving them to run down their contracts into their final year, as Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil are doing this season. Wenger added: “You will be in a position where you either extend for money you cannot afford, or go into the final year of their contract.”.—The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2017