Last weekend Brazilian youngster Endrick lit up the football world by scoring a late winner against England at Wembley at just 17-years-old, announcing himself to the masses as a potential star of the future in the sport.
Currently playing for Palmeiras in Brazil, Real Madrid have secured the youngster’s services for the foreseeable future – he will make the move to Europe in July of this year at the end of this season. This is the latest player at the end of a long line of highly-touted youngsters that the likes of Madrid have bought – but how do they keep on doing it?
We spoke to Bet9ja Ambassador Victor Ikpeba who told us the secret tactic behind Madrid’s transfer market magic.
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Buying from source is the key!
The main mistake that a lot of big clubs make with transfers is allowing far too much space for risk within a deal. An example of this is when a team buys a young player from a rival after just one or two seasons for a huge amount of money, only to be disappointed when the player takes a long time to perform up to the standard required.
We have seen this recently with Chelsea – they have spent £300m combined on Mudryk, Fernandez and Caicedo from domestic or European rivals and are still looking a long way from getting their money’s worth for each player.
This is where teams like Madrid are extremely smart. They are such a massive club with a huge scouting network that can find players when they are still developing and sign them from their original clubs in places like South America for lesser fees. They did this with Vinicius Junior, Rodrygo and Fede Valverde, who have all increased in value substantially.
If they’d waited for a smaller European club to pick them up before buying them, they wouldn’t have got the same kind of bargain.
Using the size of the club is important!
One way that Real Madrid safeguard their investments is by using the size of the club and the attention that they attract to create a lot of hype around each signing before they’ve even stepped on the field, which in turn leads to more fans being interested in the player and them being a more valuable asset for the club.
Martin Odegaard is a great example of this – obviously he’s a world-class player now, captaining Arsenal, but there wasn’t space for him in Madrid’s midfield at the time. They signed him when he was just 15-years-old and he became one of the most talked about youngsters in world football – any club that would’ve wanted to sign him would have also been paying extra for the amount of attention he’d generate for their side. You can also include teams who wanted to sign him on loan as well – it’s all good media scrutiny. Even if Arsenal now probably feel like they got a bargain, Madrid made a good bit of profit.
I hope Endrick is a massive success, because he looks like an incredible talent. Madrid rarely mess these sorts of transfers up and these are some of the reasons why.
