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Today’s story-teller is Japanese football striker [W:Kazuyoshi Miura].

The story is about the transfer business.

Changing jobs is common for salaried workers, but for football players, transferring teams is even more common. If a player belongs to one team for over five years, he becomes part of the furniture.

In his career, Miura has transferred football teams over 10 times. The football players gain the biggest chance for a raise when they transfer from a smaller club to a bigger club.

Miura says that unfortunately the transfer business is poorly performed in Japan compared to other countries.

Japanese clubs have lack of the mentality of upgrading the value of the players at the transfer. Miura is concerned that even transfer of some big names does not work as a big business in Japan.

Miura says, “Football players are similar to shares. Nobody sells shares for free. When I was told that he was not in the club’s future plans at the Croatian club, Dinamo Zagreb, the club set a transfer fee of more than $300,000 despite they got me without any transfer fee. Because of this high transfer fee, it took quite a while before I could get an offer. Club tried to make a profit. That is what business is all about.”

Meanwhile, Miura takes Brazil as an example. In Brazil, the teams, which have no chance of winning or demotion, start to use veteran players who are out of club’s plan at practice and regular games before the end of the season.

The purpose is to show the other clubs that the players are still valuable even they are out of their plan.

Doing so, it gives an impression that the clubs want to transfer the player in a better condition as much as possible.

The NIKKEI 11/27/2009 by Kazuyoshi Miura
(former Japanese national football team player, Yokohama FC in Japan Professional Football League)

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