Soccer is “the world’s game.” Not only is it an international passion, it is an international business. Players are transferred between clubs for tens of millions of euro, and sometimes over €100 million.
Imagine you have a nice, comfortable office job, making enough to support your family in your own country. Now, a much bigger competing company offered your employer several times your salary, and after some negotiations involving you and the two companies, you moved to Turkey to begin working for the new company. However, you don’t speak a word of Turkish and you have to find a new home for you and your family, new schools for your children, and a new employer for your spouse.
The specifics of this scenario often vary, but this can happen to professional soccer players. Of course, the players do have the final say in transferring between clubs, and oftentimes the transfer comes with an increase in the already extraordinary salary. However, players often have a hard time settling in at new clubs, especially when the club is in a new country. This can affect player performance and, ultimately, the success of the club in a particular season. Some clubs do a better job than others with this process, but what goes into a player settling in anyway?
As Arsenal Manager, Arsène Wenger, said about the singing of international star Alexis Sánchez, “You have to consider a little bit the history of the player first. If it’s the first move for a player from his home country, or from his family, it’s a bit more sensitive subject. If the player has already played in some other countries, that of course helps.”
“The move is a reward for what [Sánchez] really wanted,” said Wenger. “Sometimes a player moves somewhere that is not definitely the choice that he wanted. Another step is that the team welcomes you … and in some parts of the team, when you need it sometimes, you can feel at home. That means that there are people inside the squad with a similar culture.”
Wenger continued, “Off the pitch, that’s a bit, sometimes, less predictable, [and] more sensitive as well because you need to find the right housing, your family needs to like it as well, your children need to find the right school, all these kind of things that you cannot predict. But we have one person who really takes care of them, and he does a marvelous job. When all fits well, you have a chance to have a happy player.”
So when all these factors fall in line, a player like Alexis Sánchez can make a huge impact on the season (he currently has 18 goals on 32 appearances for Arsenal), and can potentially affect the club’s history.
But even within a club, players don’t always experience such a smooth integration. Gabriel Paulista, a defender recently signed by Arsenal from Villarreal in Spain, arrived in England with less than a handful of words in his English dictionary.
“At the moment, he doesn’t speak a word of English, and that can cost you goals,” said Wenger. “If you mix ‘going forward’ with ‘going backward,’ it can cost you.”
This process is not, then, as black and white as one club making money (in Villarreal’s case, around 11 million British pounds), while the other club receives a new player. No one can absolutely say whether a player will settle in well at his new club, despite any number of factors.
As Wenger said, even when everything seems to have gone smoothly, the best you can hope for is “a chance to have a happy player.”