Signing-On Fees for Free Agents — The Biggest Loophole PSR Cannot See

In January 2026, I was standing in the mixed zone corridor after a match in London. There was no crowd noise, only the sound of studs scraping across concrete and someone swallowing hard before a microphone. An agent walked past me, stopped for half a step, and said into his phone: "Stop talking about transfer fees. Talk about signing-on fees."

That sentence stopped me. In fifteen years covering the transfer market, I had grown used to every figure being placed on a scale under the light of Financial Fair Play (FFP) and the Premier League's Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR). But signing-on fees for free agents remain a dark zone. They do not appear on the transfer board. They have no "transfer fee" column. They drift away like soft costs, and almost no one at the regulator manages to ask a question before the handshake is done.

Luzhniki taught me this: every move begins with a bad touch. In the economics of football, the biggest bad touch is rarely the transfer fee. It is the signing-on fee.

To understand why, you have to look at how the market has worked over the past three seasons. As the Premier League tightened PSR — capping losses at 105 million pounds over three years for most clubs — sporting directors were forced to look for workarounds. They could not spend wildly as they did in the previous decade. Everton were docked points for breaching the rules. Nottingham Forest were docked points. Another major club is awaiting judgment. In boardrooms, the question is no longer "whom do we buy" but "how do we buy without the maths blowing up".

At the same time, UEFA's Financial Fair Play rules tightened the accounting of contract amortisation. Many clubs had stretched contracts to seven or eight years to split transfer fees into smaller annual amortisation charges. But when UEFA capped the maximum amortisation period at five years, that route closed. Finance directors had to find another door, and the widest door open was the free agent.

The case of Lionel Messi leaving Barcelona in August 2026 is the clearest global example. Barcelona could not register a new contract because it breached LaLiga's salary cap, and Messi departed as a free agent. The club lost the greatest player in its history without receiving any transfer fee. The loophole does not exist only in the Premier League — it is systemic.

Free agents became the perfect escape. No transfer fee means no amortisation of a fixed asset. On the surface it sounds sensible: the club saves money. But who is saving, and how?

In May, I sat in a café near a Championship club's training ground. A data analyst at the club, whom I have known for years, told me about a free transfer his side had just completed. The player arrived with a "zero transfer fee". But the signing-on fee was four million pounds, paid in one lump. Agent fees for two representatives came close to two million more. And the weekly wage was among the highest in the squad.

In total, the commitment far exceeded a ten-million-pound permanent deal spread over four years. Yet in the quarterly accounts, that outlay does not wear the face of a transfer. It is scattered across several lines: operating costs, agent remuneration, legal expenses.

I once tracked another case in the Premier League. A mid-table club signed a 29-year-old midfielder whose contract had just expired. The headlines announced a "free transfer". But when the year-end accounts were published, the "agent remuneration" line jumped sharply from the previous season, and the "other operating expenses" line swelled too. No one in the boardroom had to explain, because the spending was not tied to a specific transfer contract. This is organised silence.

The empty-stadium months of May taught me: football is a conversation, not a monologue. The signing-on fee story is a conversation between accounting and sport — and accounting's voice is usually louder on paper, even though on the pitch you only hear the manager.

To see the mechanism clearly, break a normal contract into cost lines.

A player is bought for 50 million pounds on a five-year contract with a weekly wage of 200,000 pounds. The transfer fee is amortised evenly in the accounts: ten million pounds a year. This is the number the regulator sees immediately. It is transparent, comparable, and open to challenge. If a club spends too much on deals like this, PSR blows up.

By contrast, a free agent of comparable quality arrives with a zero transfer fee. On the surface, the club saves 50 million pounds. In reality, to persuade him not to sign elsewhere, the club must pay a signing-on fee — usually between 10 and 20 percent of the player's market value, sometimes more. For a player worth 50 million, the signing-on fee can reach eight to ten million pounds, paid up front, with no amortisation. Add agent fees, typically five to ten percent. Add a wage usually 15 to 25 percent higher than an equivalent permanent deal, because there is no transfer fee to split the risk between two clubs.

In other words, a "free" agent can cost more than a permanent signing, yet appears in the books as something lighter.

Amortisation is the main tool the regulator uses to measure a club's spending. When a contract carries no transfer fee, it also carries no amortisation. That means it is almost invisible to every calculation of loss. The club still spends money, but there is no line to compare it against.

This is the core point. FFP and PSR were designed to police large, predictable outlays. Transfer fees sit in plain view. Signing-on fees do not. They are not amortised over the contract, not benchmarked against market value, and not shown on any public transfer board. They become a hidden cost, paid through many different lines.

Meanwhile, selling clubs still face constraints such as sell-on clauses and release clauses. Those clauses appear clearly in contracts and can be audited. But signing-on fees for free agents have no equivalent mechanism. No sell-on clause applies when a player arrives for nothing. No share goes back to the former club. The whole value flows in one direction.

In a supporters' forum I follow — one that once drew more than 400 participants during the empty-stadium months of 2026 — I saw the same thing at a smaller scale. When a club publishes its accounts, fans typically look only at the net transfer figure. They do not see the signing-on fee line. They do not see the agent commission. And so they cannot challenge it.

That is why I believe signing-on fees for free agents do more damage than transfer fees. They are both an outlay and a mechanism that blurs responsibility. They turn a big deal into a string of small amounts no one connects. And they let a club declare "we are not spending" while in reality committing more than a permanent deal would require.

There is another angle few notice: the effect on the dressing room. When a free agent arrives on a wage higher than teammates in the same position, that gap is not explained by a transfer fee. In a permanent deal, a high wage can be justified by the club's investment. With a free agent, there is no justification beyond "we did not have to pay a fee". And a dressing room split by wage disparity is a fragile dressing room — something any manager who has worked in the Championship knows.

Here a paradox appears that few mention. When a club is forced to comply with PSR, its natural response is to turn to free agents. But that does not reduce spending. It merely shifts spending from a monitored area to an unmonitored one.

Many say free agents are a "bargain". I think that is a skewed view of the market. In an efficient market, a free agent is not cheaper than a contracted player. He is only cheaper on paper. His market value is still set by supply and demand. The gap the club "saves" does not disappear — it moves into the pockets of the player, the agent, and the intermediaries.

In recent seasons, several top stars have chosen to stay until their contracts expired rather than be sold. Their clubs lost the transfer fee, but the players received larger signing-on fees at their new clubs. This mechanism encourages players to wait rather than move. And as more players do so, the pressure on smaller clubs grows, because they cannot compete on signing-on fees.

This leads to a consequence I have observed for years. Free agents tend to be overpriced on the wage market, because the one-off signing-on fee is pushed into the long-term wage. When a club does not pay a transfer fee, it is willing to pay a higher wage. But that wage becomes the benchmark for the whole squad.

There is one more subtle point. Signing-on fees do not only bypass FFP. They also bypass the logic of the final contract year. In football, a player nearing the end of his contract is usually treated as a depreciating asset, and the club sells cheaply to avoid losing him for nothing. But when the same player leaves on a free, he receives a signing-on fee that can match much of the transfer fee his old club once demanded. His value does not vanish; it merely moves from the club to the player and the agent.

The rhythm of a match can only be heard when you put your ear to the grass. The rhythm of the market can only be heard when you open the accounts and read every small line, instead of staring at the number on the news ticker.

So what is worth watching next?

Regulators are slowly waking up to the loophole. UEFA and the Premier League have begun requiring disclosure of agent fees, and some 2026-24 accounts have published large figures for intermediary activity. But disclosure does not mean those sums are folded into FFP calculations.

Clubs are also changing contract structures. Some are shifting signing-on fees into instalments rather than a lump sum, or tying them to appearances. That is a sign they themselves are growing wary of this outlay.

The biggest question remains open: will a regulator dare to bring signing-on fees into the same monitoring framework as transfer fees? I have not seen a clear signal. But as long as a gap exists, money will find its way through it.

An article shared 50,000 times does not come from a number; it comes from a heart touched in the right place. A fair transfer market is the same: it does not come from pretty figures on a news ticker, but from our willingness to look at the cost lines no one wants to talk about.