2024-01-23 21:28:35
About two weeks have passed since the opening of the January transfer window in Israel and among almost all the parties in the football industry, this is one of the strangest/drowsiest windows so far, perhaps also in the spirit of the war that is taking place and the difficulty of landing foreigners in the country.
Let’s start with the facts: 58 new players arrived at Premier League teams in the January transfer window last year, of which 27 were foreign players. For the sake of comparison, so far, in half the time that has passed since the opening of the season window and with two weeks left until its end, only 24 players have signed, of which only four are foreigners.
The trend of foreigners not coming to Israeli football in the current window is therefore understandable: quite a few are afraid to come because of the ongoing war, but beyond that, there are quite a few reasons that affect the situation. To this end, we spoke with several officials in Israeli football, who addressed the reasons for falling asleep in the current window.
Eden Kartsev (Radad Jabara)
“January is always a market of compromises unless the preparations are made long before. This year it is even more difficult because of the war and in fact at the stage when the management had to organize for January they were not exactly in a position to do so. The foreigners are always eager to come here and it’s always difficult in January,” said one of the senior agents.
The same agent also adds a tip: “You need to open your mind and see which market you are in at that moment and react accordingly. You only need to invest and check other markets than usual. Most of the free players from the opposite leagues (Sweden, USA, Norway, etc.) were missed. From here you approach the market of players whose teams, by and large, don’t want them, and then you inevitably compromise.”
Another agent added in the same breath: “If you used to check foreigners for groups and find one foreigner who would agree for every ten foreigners you check, today the ratio is one foreigner who would agree for something like thirty foreigners. There is no doubt that the situation in the country affected their desire to come.”
“At the moment, the foreigners are mostly afraid to come. We talked to over five foreigners with whom we had no financial problems regarding the contract and they even wanted to come. But then, they got knee-jerk and ran away. Even in a normal situation, bringing a foreigner is not easy, so now it makes it For more complex,” says a CEO of one of the league’s teams.
Fred Friday (Radad Jabara)
“In the end yes you can find the foreigner to come here, but you do need to know how to explain things or bring in foreigners who know Israel and are less afraid and this is a trend we see from groups. The feeling is that in this window one should also deal with advocacy and marketing. In the end it’s a matter of numbers and you have to choose from what’s available.”
“Because of the war, foreigners don’t want to come. They straight up tell you no, without hearing at all who the group is that wants them and what the amounts are willing to pay them,” says one of the group owners. “If they are even willing to listen, they blackmail you and ask for offers with the goal that you will say no to them.”
The same agent quoted earlier testifies that the owner’s claims are absolutely true: “The teams say that they feel that there is much more than before. Once, the second question was if they wanted to come to Israel and the first was the money, and today it’s reversed.”
We need to talk about another parameter: the Israeli player or the young player. The load of games, the distribution of minutes and the non-arrival of many purchased players so far, provide a platform for the Israeli player as well and certainly for those young people who have just come up from the youth divisions. It is doubtful whether Elad Madmon, Yer Zambrovski, Niv Yehoshua and Lior Kassa, who became the player in the dispute between Maccabi Haifa and Maccabi Tel Aviv and chose the greens, would have received the same chances in a normal state of the league, without a load of games and without the fear of foreigners coming.
Elad Madmon (Omari Stein)
This situation creates an opportunity specifically for local and young players, whose chances of playing in a regular season would be less. It should be noted that the coaches are also more creative and make role changes for the players. The positive thing about this whole story is that the young players can get an opportunity that under normal circumstances would be difficult for them to get,” says a senior official in one of the teams.
A senior coach in one of the top playoff teams actually contradicts the difficulty of bringing in foreigners and provides a different angle from his own: “I don’t see anything different from previous windows regarding the foreigners. The problem with bringing in foreigners is the teams, I can tell you that I have seen dozens of foreigners in recent times. You just have to work with agents you trust.”
“A serious agent, checks first about that player and if he has offered him to you, then there is probably a possibility of bringing him. Even now, they send me a lot of foreigners, so those who need foreigners and want to bring, there are enough and the fact is that we also see signings. Those who want and really want with all their heart, There are enough foreigners out there.’
Another issue is the relatively few transfers between the teams and the fact that even the big ones, the producers of the top players for the other league teams, are not in a hurry to loan out players, also due to the load of games discussed earlier: “It’s no secret that the market is dormant. The big ones, which used to provide players to the smaller teams , not nearly enough,” says another owner in the Premier League.
Alan Ozbolt (Omari Stein)
“What they released at the beginning of the season, they don’t release in January. At the same time, there are also no Israeli players on the market and the teams want to keep a wide roster for two reasons: ‘both to have enough players and not for the opponent’. Due to the load, players get injured and teams want a wide roster. Suddenly, every mediocre player becomes Cristiano Ronaldo.”
“The amount of games makes the teams not rush to change the squad because otherwise they will remain exposed,” admits a coach in the Premier League. “On the other hand, the supply is not that wide and there is not much quality out there, so there is no rush to change, because there are no players sitting out that you run and bring. Most of the teams are quite equal, so it is not tempting to change. It is not that there are differences in levels, so the players are at the same level and you have no temptation “.
There is also the issue of the foreigners who are to be released: Nikos Yanakopoulos from Hapoel Pat, Koya Mbaa and Sami Burard from Hapoel Hadera, Lorenzo Paramati from Maccabi Pat and several other foreigners, are not in the professional plans of their teams, but still refuse to leave at this stage and pile up difficulties, according to the groups.
Sammy Burrard (Lilac Weiss-Rosenberg)
“The crazy thing is that there are players you don’t want and they don’t want to go: you used to come and tell them take X compensation out of all the salaries and they would agree. Today, they are making muscles, because they simply know that it will not be easy for you to find someone in their place, so you might be better off leaving them. They know that if you had money or another foreigner, you would freeze them,” says a senior official in one of these groups. Except for the Beer Sheva labor force that managed to free Patterson and Kalimela immediately at the beginning of the war, no group was able to do that.”
Finally, it is impossible to refer to the incoming market and the outgoing market of the Legionnaires: Shagib Yehezkel and Aden Kartsev have already returned to Israel, when until now, in the current transfer window, there was not a single Israeli player who took the opposite route overseas. The political situation and the war in the background certainly do not add, when one of the agents provides an interesting explanation.
Shagiv Yehezkel Betner (Hagi Michaeli)
“It is true that the Israeli player has always been in demand and the more Israelis who succeed abroad, the value of the Israeli passport keeps increasing. But the problem is that right now, teams are thinking twice about whether this burden of having an Israeli on the roster is worth it to them, and this is a consideration that lowers the value of Israeli players abroad. Don’t forget that some markets like the Turkish market were closed to us.”
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