Daniel Levy has never been regarded as one of football’s most polished public communicators, but the Tottenham Hotspur chairman instinctively recognised an opportunity to spark a swirl of intrigue when asked by a supporter during a fans’ forum whether the club retain a buy-back clause on departed superstar Harry Kane.
“Of course,” he replied, before pursing his lips in a manner that left most of those listening unsure if he was joking or serious.
Pressed on his ambiguous answer in a subsequent interview with business publication Bloomberg, Levy elaborated. “If Harry one day wants to come back to the Premier League and he wants to come to Tottenham, we would have the ability to purchase him,” he said.
That explanation, still light on detail, hints more at a first-option arrangement with Bayern Munich — whereby Spurs would be given an opportunity to bid for Kane if he ever decides to leave the Bundesliga champions — rather than a specific agreement that allows them to re-purchase their all-time leading goalscorer for a pre-agreed price.
Levy spoke at a Tottenham fans’ forum last week (David Rogers/Getty Images)
Whatever the reality, there was another important point that Levy left unsaid: in the seemingly unlikely event that Kane leaves Bayern to rejoin Tottenham, it will not be as a result of anything written into his current contract.
That is because, in a vast majority of cases, buy-back or first-option clauses offer little more than theoretical rather than practical transfer insurance — a way to salve the wounds of supporters aggrieved by the sale of a much-loved or highly promising player rather than something that meaningfully increases the chances of a reunion somewhere down the road.
It is true that a variety of buy-back and first-option clauses are becoming more common in transfer agreements in England, particularly in deals concerning younger players. It is also true that, when deployed intelligently, they can provide some tangible benefits.
They allow a selling club to bank a transfer fee and avoid using a loan spot for an outgoing player while retaining a mechanism for bringing them back into the fold if they develop, rediscover their best form or simply if circumstances change. The buying club also has more investment in the success of a player they own than in a loanee, even if their potential sale profit may be capped by the buy-back agreement.
The most successful buy-back practitioners can be found in Spain, where Real Madrid and Barcelona both regularly include such clauses in sales of their own academy products or other developing young players.
Casemiro and Dani Carvajal were both bought back by Real after being loaned and then sold to Porto and Bayer Leverkusen respectively, going on to establish themselves as key players in a Champions League-winning dynasty at Santiago Bernabeu.
Casemiro spent the 2014-15 season at FC Porto (Dennis Grombkowski/Bongarts/Getty Images)
Madrid have even utilised the buy-back system to make a sizeable profit in the transfer market, activating their £26million ($32.2m) option to re-sign academy graduate Alvaro Morata from Juventus in the summer of 2016 before selling him on to Chelsea a year later for around £60million.
But even these eye-catching success stories represent only a small fraction of the buy-back clauses Madrid have included in deals for players they have sold over the past decade, with most remaining unused. The same ratio is even more lop-sided for clubs who are not bathed in the perennial glory of being 14-time European champions or considered the preferred destination of virtually every footballer in the world.
Tottenham’s bitter rivals Chelsea have included buy-back or other preferential clauses in a growing number of transfers in recent years, particularly when selling graduates of their renowned Cobham academy. Roma striker Tammy Abraham can be brought back to Stamford Bridge for a fee of around £69million, while the club also hold matching rights on any offer for Crystal Palace defender Marc Guehi.
Both examples highlight that, in reality, such clauses rarely make for simple transfers.
Abraham has publicly refused to rule out playing for Chelsea again, but paying more than double the £34million they received from Roma in 2021 would require a very high degree of confidence that he can be one of Europe’s best strikers once he recovers from an ACL injury. In the case of Guehi, the player would still need to choose his old club over another bidder not burdened by the lingering memory of selling him in the first place.
Guehi and Abraham in training at Chelsea in 2021. Both left that summer (Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
Chelsea’s emphasis on buy-back clauses began partly as a response to the scarring losses of Kevin De Bruyne and Mohamed Salah during Jose Mourinho’s second spell as manager.
Yet when De Bruyne left Wolfsburg to join Manchester City in August 2015, Mourinho was still in charge at Stamford Bridge and nothing in the Belgian’s public comments in the years since suggest he would have agreed to play for him again, buy-back or no buy-back. It also seems unlikely that Salah would have been eager to return to Chelsea, a club where, in the words of Mourinho in 2018, he had been “just a lost kid in London, a lost kid in a new world”.
Players have free will regardless of what clauses or agreements may theoretically favour certain clubs in their contracts. That is particularly important to remember with a player of Kane’s calibre, a superstar in the prime of his career.
The modern history of elite football transfers tells us that, if he ever asks Bayern to sell him, it will be because he already has a specific destination in mind. He will be the one to choose his first option, not Tottenham or any other club.
Even if Kane does at some point decide he wants to return to Spurs, Levy’s answers suggest an agreement would still need to be negotiated with Bayern; in other words, most of the legwork of a standard transfer would have to be done. Within this context, having a “first-option clause” or something similar in the deal that took him to Germany last summer is immaterial.
Ultimately, the most reliable value of a buy-back or preferential transfer clause is that it helps you quieten supporter anger, even when losing a club legend like Kane, by dangling the possibility of a glorious reunion in the future.
The concept is known as “winning the press conference” — or in this case, a fans’ forum.
GO DEEPER
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(Top photo: James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)
