The Clause That Picks The Team
Real Madrid have loaned Endrick to Lyon for a €1 million loan fee. That fee gets reduced by €200,000 for every 5 games he starts. Play 25 games for instance, no loan fee at all.
Lyon's CEO said there's no penalty clause if they don't play him, saying it's an incentive structure, not a punishment mechanism. But that's just semantics. There's 1 million euros at play, whether you frame it as a reward for playing him or a punishment for not playing him.
And it's worth noting that this isn't a new mechanism. It's been happening for years in Premier League loan deals, just normally via wage contributions rather than loan fees.
Here's how it works:
A Premier League club has an 18-year-old on £10,000 a week. They want him getting first-team football, so they loan him to a League Two club. That League Two club can't afford the salary, so the wage contribution is £2,000 a week.
But here's the kicker. For every week the player doesn't play at least 60 minutes, that contribution jumps to £6,000 or even £10,000. Either completely unaffordable and seriously damaging to the club's finances.
So the player plays. Every week. Even if he has a bad game, he's straight back in the team. Works because the Premier League club gets their player developed and the League Two club gets a young Premier League talent.
The player who loses out is the League Two lad sitting on the bench who has no idea he's competing against a clause, not just another player's performance. Selection isn't based on form anymore. It's based on finance.
I've been involved in a few of these deals. When it works, it works brilliantly.
But I've also seen it go badly wrong when clubs forget to include an injury exception.
I moved a player from a Premier League club to a Championship club. He got injured in the second game. Didn't play again for the rest of the season.
The Championship club had to pay his entire wage. Over half a million pounds for a player who never took the field.
A properly structured clause would have sent the player back to the Premier League club for rehab the moment he got injured with no more contribution.
💡 You're not seeing anything new with Endrick. You're just witnessing a widely used structure for the first time.