I’ve commented earlier on innovative structuring of football player contracts, with call options and put options and all other exotic options being involved. Now I see another interesting transfer structure, this time in the contract of Juventus (and Spain) striker Alvaro Morata.
In 2014, Real Madrid sold Morata to Juventus for a transfer fee of €20 million, but the sale had a “buy back clause”. Embedded in the sale was an option for Real Madrid to buy back Morata at any time for €30 million, and now it seems like they’re exercising it!
While this might be based on Morata’s performances (both for Juventus and Spain) in the last couple of years, the interesting thing about the buyback is that Real Madrid are unlikely to keep hold of Morata. Instead, talk is that they plan to sell him on, with PSG and Manchester United being interested in the forward.
Effectively the deal is something like “as long as Morata’s perceived market value is < €30M, Juventus can keep him, but once his perceived market value goes up, all the upside goes to Real Madrid”. The downside (in case Morata regressed as a player and his market value went below €20M), of course, remained with Juventus. To put it simply, Madrid is exercising its call option on the player.
While loan agreements have earlier had clauses such as “right but obligation to make deal permanent” or “obligation but not right to make deal permanent”, this is the first time I’m seeing an actual transfer deal with this kind of a clause, which is being exercised. So why did Juventus and Real Madrid hammer out such a complicated-looking structure?
For Juventus, the simple answer is that the option they wrote reduced the cost of buying the player. While they have given up on significant upside in writing this call option, this is what perhaps made the purchase possible for them, and in some ways, it’s worked out by giving them two more Scudetti.
The answer is less clear from Real Madrid’s perspective. Clearly, the fact that they got a call option meant that they believed there was a significant chance of Morata improving significantly. At the point of time of sale (2014), however, he was surplus to their requirements and they believed sending him elsewhere would help in this significant improvement.
It is possible that the market in 2014 wasn’t willing to bear the price implied by Real Madrid’s expectation of Morata’s improvement, but was only willing to pay based on his then abilities and form. In other words, while Morata’s current abilities were fairly valued, his future abilities were grossly undervalued.
And Madrid did the smart thing by unbundling the current and future values, by structuring a deal that included a call option!
Again, this is only my speculation of how it would have turned out, but it’s indeed fascinating. Given how global financial markets are performing nowadays, it seems like structuring of football deals is now far more interesting than structuring financial derivatives! But then the market is illiquid!