Soccer Politics / The Politics of Football

The business of a soccer club is to produce a winning team. At the end of the day sports are a form of entertainment. Too often, though, actions taken place in the board room or at the negotiating table take away from the entertainment displayed on the field. At times, the aggressiveness and sometimes greediness of clubs leads to failure on the field. Specifically, the mountains of debt some European clubs have amassed in recent years often do more harm than good for a club. Last year, players in La Liga — one of the world’s richest leagues — nearly went on strike when one club failed to pay wages. Earlier this year, Rangers FC entered administration after they could not pay some $77 million the club owed in taxes. I visited Rangers when I was younger on a European tour and since that time have considered it one of the oldest and most notorious club in Europe. The same has happened to F.C. Portsmouth for the second time in as many years. In both cases, the financial problems were the result of poor management decisions. When clubs with such great histories are suffering in this way, we have to ask ourselves whether there are fundamental problems with the way the business of soccer is being managed in many places.

In 2005, Malcom Glazer used the financial tool of a leveraged buyout (LBO) to purchase Manchester United for $1.5 billion and make the company private. In the end, I would argue, this action ultimately hampered the team’s ability to keep or purchase new star players. A leveraged buyout is where the takeover artist will borrow the majority of the cost to purchase the new company against the company’s future cash flows and current assets. More often than not in a LBO the new owners will have to sell key parts of the new business to pay down the debt. In the case of a soccer club their assets are their stadium and training grounds as well as their players. Manchester United, for instance, sold Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid for a record transfer fee of  $132 million. Even with the sale of Ronaldo, United has been unable to manage their mountainous debt payments and recently reissued shares of the club on the New York Stock Exchange for public purchase. Glazer raised $300 million dollars in the IPO, half will be used to pay down the $663 million in remaining debt. NYT blogger Graham Ruthven claims Sir Alex Ferguson may even benefit financially from the IPO. The IPO took place on Friday August 10th, with a $14 price. A price that was significantly supported by the underwriters of the IPO throughout the day.  But what if the $800 million spent on interest payments and banking fees could have instead been spent on increasing the player and fan experience at Manchester United? Even with the new issuance, control of the club will be retained by the Glazer family as they will retain 67% of B shares which have voting power, so little will likely change in the general approach taken to the finances of the club.

As you can see from the photograph below, the actions by Glazer have outraged many fans of Manchester United, who consider that he has in some ways taken the club from them. They have a point. After all, as a “brand” a club is not only made up of it’s players and managers, but also of the fans and the tradition they carry with them.

Another instance of over spending and debt damaging a club is Leeds United, formally of the Premier League. Rather than piling on debt through a LBO , the club borrowed to purchase players. Leeds were a big club in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in a Champions League semi-final place in 2001. But the club was ultimately undone by their Chairman Peter Ridsdale’s idea to go for it. He proceeded to use shady financial products to purchase players with borrowed money using future ticket sales as collateral. Essentially the fans loyalty. Ultimately it failed and the club had to sell assets at a blistering pace as the club entered administration: the stadium Elland Road (pictured below), training ground at Thorp Arch, and any player that was worth a nickel, including some considered to be part of England’s golden generation. Great players were sold at a severe discount due to the team’s financial troubles. The club also suffered demotion to England’s third tier and have since had to claw themselves back from the brink of extinction.

The idea of corporate borrowing is nothing new. Most companies must borrow to fund future growth. But there is a line between intelligent borrowing and getting caught in a credit crunch. Just like the many U.S. home owners who over-extended themselves between 2003 and 2008, soccer clubs may soon find themselves unable to pay their debts. In Europe, several countries — Spain, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Italy — are desperately trying to reorganize its debt in order to make payments. Fiorentino Perez, the Chairman of Real Madrid and creator of the “Galacticos” is in the midst of de-leveraging in his real business, A.C.S., or Actividades de Construcción y Servicios. The company is one of the largest building services companies in the world. As he has done with Real Madrid, Perez has orchestrated huge loans, creating $12 billion in debt that the company has since had to sell assets to cover. Real Madrid, meanwhile, is currently $500 million in debt because of the money it has spent creating the “Galacticos” (pictured below). Many in business have believed that  borrowing to fund instant success is the winning formula.But the formula only works as long as growth outpaces debt obligations.

The authors of the book “Soccernomics,” Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, make a compelling argument that the outlandish transfer costs that have become the norm in professional soccer are not the way to success. “We studied the spending of forty English clubs between 1978 and 1997, and found that their outlay on transfers explained only 16 percent of their total variation in league position. By contrast, their spending on salaries explained a massive 92 percent of the variation” (48). They conclude that the market for player wages is efficient while the transfer market is well not efficient. You can see this inefficiency at work in many cases. Tottenham Hotspurs, for instance, transferred Jermaine Defore to Portsmouth and Robbie Keane to Liverpool for a combined $52 million only to bring them back a year later under new manager Harry Redknapp. Soccernomics provides the ultimate example of transfer market inefficiency. “In 1983 AC Milan spotted a talented young black forward playing for Watford. The word is that the player Milan liked was John Barnes, and that it then confused him with his fellow black teammate Luther Blisett.” Milan bought Blisett. This type of almost comical folly may be why, down the road, Milan has had to sell two of their most valuable players this summer to pay down debt — Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva (below), both to now super-wealthy club Paris Saint-Germain. AC Milan has run a total deficit of  245.4 million euros in the last 5 years. The spending of some of the biggest football clubs in the world is out of control.

Many clubs feel that they must take on such debt to keep up with the “Jones’s” — clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea, whose  billionaire owners are not worried about the bottom line of the clubs they own. Sheik Mansour from Qatar bought Man City for a measly $330 million but then proceeded to spend close to double that on stocking his team with talented players. He was only following the lead of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich (pictured below). UEFA reported that more than a quarter of the 650 soccer teams in Europe are spending $16.50 for every $13.50  of revenue. Running a deficit is fine for the super rich owners who care about nothing else than winning. Unfortunately not every team is owned by an owner with bottomless pockets. The massive television contracts in Europe are giving clubs increasing revenue. In June 2012 the English Premier League signed a record $4.7 billion/3 year television deal and the German Bundesliga signed a $3.2 billion/4 year deal. The deals were a 72% and 52% increase over the previous deals respectively. Compare those numbers with the $115 million Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. paid for the television rights to the Premier League in 1992. But even with the rising revenue teams are still forced to borrow to compete with the billionaire owners of the world. European teams currently run a collective $1.5 billion deficit.

Some are trying to stop the process. Michel Platini (pictured below) has launched the Financial Fair Play (FFP) plan, which is meant to force European clubs to balance their books by the 2013/14 season. If clubs fail to balance their books they will be excluded from UEFA competitions.But what if Real Madrid, Inter Milan, Manchester United, Chelsea, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Manchester City refuse to follow the rule and are kicked out of the Champions League. Mr. Platini, what happens then? Riddle me that?

Perhaps clubs will have to start running teams like my namesake, Arsene Wenger. Are we related? I  guess we will never know. He is a fantastic manager though. It is said Wenger uses statistics to judge a players future output on the field compared rather than over-evaluating a player’s past performances. He has a degree in Economic Sciences from the University of Strasburg in France: from an economic perspective, this player evaluation model makes much more sense than the approach taken by other clubs. It is similar to judging a blue chip stock. You don’t make your decision to invest on the stock’s previous performance but attempt to judge its future performance by looking at the fundamentals of the company presented in their financial reports. As players, our statistics are our financial reports.

Perhaps the Financial Fair Play plan will alter a shift in professional soccer in Europe. Barbara Berlusconi has underlined the need for change: “Soccer teams will have to transform into proper companies. If you can only spend what you get, then you have to keep costs in check and increase revenue. It’s a challenge that can become an opportunity.” This change in soccer will be a positive one if it improves what is produced on the field, or simply forces owners to be smarter with how they spend their money. The thing is soccer clubs are not like regular companies. The authors of Soccernomics say it best: “The business of soccer is soccer,” they note, and clubs “are more like musems: public-spirited organizations that aim to serve the community while remaining reasonably solvent.” The irony of what is happening today in so many clubs is that running a soccer club with pressure to make money may ultimately contradict its stated goal of winning on the field!

The headline in El País said it all: “The strike of champions.”

As of Friday, August 12, the AFE (Spanish Footballers’ Association) union resolved to strike for at least the first two matchdays of the Spanish professional football season.

Their reason is  a crisis in Spanish football related to the credit bust that, thus far, has left at least 200 players in First and Second Divisions owed €50 million in wages.

Furthermore, the players are standing against the increasing incidence of their colleagues’ wage payments being delayed, sometimes for months. What’s more, they are demanding stricter oversight from Spanish football governing bodies to prevent such situations from occurring.

The way they see it, Spanish football should be looking more in the way of countries such as Holland or Germany, where club team spending is much more controlled. They even point to the Premier League, where a team like Portsmouth, declared insolvent, is punished with relegation.

In contrast, in Spain football teams have been juridically ignored regarding their spending and labor practices. To highlight the situation: Zaragoza owes its players millions from last season, yet have already signed eight new players, one of whom cost €8.6 million. Players, bound to contracts, are unable to escape the situation, and, furthermore, since there are no legal provisions to punish the nonpaying clubs, are forced to stay on since they haven’t been paid and their only hopes of getting payed are by staying put.

While many have mocked the idea of football players being slaves, one can also understand the bad positions that teams often put players in. Imagine, a young man gives up his schooling with the idea of being a professional footballer. He does so with the idea of building a career, and focusing every bit of energy on it. Yet the shelf life of an average player is shorter every season; the reality is that football is only a solid career until one’s early thirties, when the body gives out.

At this point, the situation for Spanish players is such that there is no guarantee that they will even get the financial benefits of that career. What’s more, the boom in the Spanish football industry, parallel to the boom in the economy firmly tied to real estate speculation and excessive spending, has seen teams spending exorbitant sums on players–many of them quite bad–from all over the world. The past 15-20 years have seen a global expansion in the game–via TV rights and merchandising–that has favored cosmopolitan teams with universal appeal.

Now, with the burst of the bubble and the drastic slashing of banking credit (not to mention the possibility of increased regulation), many teams are beginning to look like sinking ships. Very expensive ships with no life rafts.

What’s more, since credit has dried, very few teams are able to get any, and we could have guessed that those with that luxury are Real Madrid and Barcelona. Both teams continue to sign players left and right, paying high wages and enjoying the profits of their all-encompassing appeal in every corner of the world.

In many ways, it’s becoming a two-horse race; a look at revenues in Spain, compared to similar charts for league titles in the last ten years, shows that there is one Real Madrid, one Barcelona, and a field full of also-rans.

In a Spain (and a Europe) in which the common people are being forced to swallow “austerity measures” (cuts to social spending and increased taxes), that makes the idea of the football business somewhat more ridiculous. While small and medium businesses in Spain, still a strong economic force, are finding their credit to be cut, they see a sector of the Spanish economy not bound to the same basic rules. Solvency, spending what one can afford to pay, paying one’s employees.

And yet, the press, while highlighting the strike (though not so much its financial implications), still warms up to the idea of the start of the new season, not to mention the Fabregas saga. The nationalistic Madrid-based papers (especially AS and Marca), as well as the Catalan dailies (such as Sport),  have also given these lastly mentioned stories much more prominent attention.

At the same time, as the 15-m movement against the austerity measures continues to be vociferous in Spain, El Pais also featured an article about former Sporting Gijón footballer Javi Poves, who quit the sport for “ethical reasons,” motivated by his anarchist political beliefs.

The 15-m, short for “15th of May,” protestors have been staging nonviolent protests since May against what they view as governmental and corporate irresponsibility in the economic crisis. They demand, among other things, accountability and the upholding of workers’ rights.

And interesting bedfellows the two groups, footballers and protestors make, at least in terms of our discussion here. As the football season approaches once again, so do we get closer to finding more about the true depths and consequences of the global economic crisis. Football, more than ever, parades the fantasy that all is well, that the world is in order, and that the best team wins, again and again.

In 1998, as the French team prepared to play their first World Cup match, they heard singing from the opposing team’s locker room. The Bafana Bafana — in their first World Cup appearance after the end of apartheid, fielding an integrated team — were gearing up to play with song, and as the two team’s marched down the tunnel out onto the pitch, they continued singing, sending echoes through the halls. For Lilian Thuram, born in Guadeloupe, and Marcel Desailly, born in Ghana, it was a deeply moving moment. “Everything was clashing” in Thuram’s mind before the game, he later recounted in his autobiography as he thought of his “far-away origins, of slavery, of the slave trade.” “I’m with the French team,” he thought, “but I could just as well have found myself at that instant in the other locker room.” “It gave me goose-bumps,” Marcel Desailly wrote of the game. “I forgot football, and thought of Mandela.”

France defeated South Africa that day, at the beginning of a run that ultimately brought them the World Cup. Tomorrow, as France and South Africa face off again twelve years later, the contrast couldn’t be starker. Desailly is gone, Thuram too — how we miss him! — and the French team is in disarray, in the midst of an explosive scandal that has all tongues wagging in France and beyond. But one thing remains the same: the French team is today, as it has been since at least 1996, perhaps the most important site through which the nation exposes, expresses, and debates issues of race, belonging, and the legacies of empire.

To understand what is happening with the French team today, you have to understand both the longer history and the recent catalyst for the scandal. The longer history is that Domenech has been, essentially since he took up his job, heavily criticized and rather disliked (to put it gently) by many players. There were many rumors of conflict between Zidane and Domenech in 2006, though they were ultimately overshadowed by the victories and then stunning conclusion of that year’s tournament. One common explanation of why the team did so well in 2006 is simply that Zidane actually coached the team, with strong support from Makelele and Thuram. Indeed, when Thuram visited Duke last fall and students asked him about Domenech, he was circumspect as always, but did say that when you get the World Cup you really don’t play for the coach anymore as much as for your teammates. Of course, to do that, you have to be given the chance to get into a rhythm with your teammates, too, something the 2006 team did, interestingly, during a long-awaited journey to Martinique to play a friendly match against Costa Rica.

During France’s disastrous showing at Euro 2008, the dissension was once again clear. And that’s when things really began taking a curious turn. In any normal universe, a coach who completely flubbed a major international tournament would be replaced. But Domenech was kept. And he was kept through the difficult qualifying period of the French team. The brief player’s strike on Sunday, in fact, was a long-time coming, the result of accumulated grievances, an expression of frustration at having been stuck in an absurd and increasingly unlivable situation. Obviously the players have played their role in the difficulties of the French team. But no one, it seems, can really explain why the F.F.F. kept Domenech, against the wishes of players, journalists, seemingly everyone. Lots of people have been hurling insults against Domenech while watching their TVs and reading their newspapers for some time. Anelka’s crime was to say them to his face.

But the real catalyst for the latest madness was really not so much Anelka’s outburst against Domenech during the Uruguay-Mexico game. The explosion really began because L’Equipe, France’s major sports newspaper, heard about the comments (from what Evra described as a “traitor” within the ranks) and decided to print them not in an article, but as it’s front page headline. It was, most certainly, a low point for a paper that has had plenty of them over the years. (They pummeled Aime Jacquet mercilessly in 1998, for instance — until his team won — and the normally mild-mannered coach took delight in rubbing it in their faces, calling them and other journalists “thugs.”) It was also great business for the newspaper: they sold many more papers than they usually do.

Anelka, who refused to apologize for the comments, was expelled from the team. That is what drove Evra and his teammates, in a gesture of solidarity with Anelka, to refuse to practice on Sunday. In doing so, they were being deeply French, participating in a venerable, long-standing, and much cherished tradition of work-place resistance.

That, however, is not how most French commentators took it. Instead, after having lambasted Domenech for years, many talking heads and politicians in France suddenly found much more convenient scapegoats: the foul-mouthed, overpaid, ungrateful players on the team. French television wheeled out Alain Finkelkraut, the dependable purveyor of chic, intellectual racism in France, who made headlines in 2006 when he declared that the French team was “black-black-black” and that all of Europe laughed at France because of this. The far-right immediately offered it’s interpretation: players like Anelka, who grew up in the projects of France’s suburbs, were ungovernable, irascible, dangerous, just like the other young men from those neighborhoods. And on the commentary pages and chat rooms of many newspapers, there was so much racist vitriol, seemingly just waiting for the opportunity to spew forth, that at least one paper actually shut down its commentary section, which had become ungovernable itself. The terms thrown at the players — “hooligans,” “spoiled children,” etc. — out in the open were shadowed by much worse on the web. There were interesting echoes here of the diverse responses to Zidane’s 2006 headbutt as well. Indeed, there is much to be learned by comparing reactions to the two events. It has all, however, gotten completely out of hand, as one embittered commentator (whose words are translated here by Jennifer Doyle), has noted.

The easy, much repeated line right now is that, with all the money they get, the players should simply do what they are told. These guys are millionaires, right? So shut up and play. But are we seriously to accept that there are no conditions in which athletes might talk back, and act against those who control them? It’s not as if Domenech was a great, even a decent coach: he has clearly driven this team into the ground. Was Evra’s mobilization of his team in defense of one of their own truly a crime, an absurdity, sheer idiocy as Domenech described it? Or maybe just an attempt to salvage something, anything — a shred of solidarity — in the midst of the breakdown?

There was anger among the players, expressed clearly by Evra, at the fact that words spoken in the locker room — shocking as a front-page headline, certainly, but also probably not all that uncommon in the locker rooms of losing teams at half-time the world over — had become public. Zidane made this point in defense of the players, suggesting that while Anelka should not have said what he did, it should have been kept among the players and coach. Indeed, the FFF and Domenech could easily have chosen a different path: they could have admitted that Anelka, frustrated, sounded off, but accepted that this sometimes happens and perhaps found another way to deal with it than expelling him from the team. The bigger issue here is that there seems to be a demand that players not think too hard or speak out. But if the players were frustrated, I think, it is not because they are spoiled or don’t love the team, but rather precisely because they were frustrated and devastated by what was happening to it. Indeed, for Evra and the other players to put themselves on the line in an organized gesture as they did to me signals precisely the opposite of what many critics suggested it did. If they really didn’t care, they could simply have retreated into themselves, played badly, and gone home quietly. Open rebellion of the kind the team demonstrated is always costly to players, even those as comfortable as these are. While we can certainly debate the tactics and timing of what the players did, we should see that their action was out in the hopes that an alternative was possible that would be better for the team, and therefore for France’s fortunes in the World Cup.

But what has just happened in France is a classic operation on the part of the media and the political class. Focusing on Anelka’s angry words and Evra’s gesture, they have found a convenient scapegoat — not to mention a great way to sell papers and set up another round of often insane chatter on the television. For too many, Anelka and Evra have been made to embody what is wrong with French football, rather than the serious problems at the core of the F.F.F. that has allowed the situation to decline to this level. The institutions are spared, the players take the fall. The far-right, of course, is happy to play up the idea that it’s the players who are the problem, for the players on the French football team for a long time provided a potent symbolic alternative, one in which diversity and complexity could be celebrated as French virtues rather than as dangers. The squad, in fact, has long been about the only national institution in which there were a number of prominent, even at times powerful, individuals who had grown up in the French banlieue.

Though obviously the football team, and it’s crisis, has it’s own dynamic, there is a startling parallel with the way French political leaders have, in the past years, dealt with the major political and social crises that threaten to tear it apart. Having created a massive impasse in which large numbers of French citizens feel insulted, marginalized, and discriminated against, France’s political class has sought to exonerate itself by creating it’s demons. They’ve tried, and in some ways succeeded, in convincing many people that the real problem is women in burkas, or fifteen-year-olds who write graffiti. It is, of course, a horrifying easy political game to play, and it largely works. At the same time, of course, it’s really a rear-guard action: France has already changed, and France will continue to change, with it’s colonial history and its post-colonial realities an inescapable part of its future.

What will happen tomorrow on the pitch? Last week, reeling from the France-Mexico game, I imagined the French team going on strike in order to help South Africa move on. I had no idea that they would, in a way, go on strike this past Sunday. Now Domenech has intimated that some players may not want to play tomorrow, suggesting some may still be on strike. There are, of course, precedents for this: in 1968, professional footballers joined students and workers in a strike. And ten years earlier, Algerian footballers in France went on a different kind of strike, withdrawing from their professional teams and the French international team to play for Algeria instead. This weeks events, of course, have been of much less weight, and import, than these earlier incidents. But that is no reason to ignore that the actions of Anelka and Evra are still political in some sense, and that the furor surrounding them is just more proof of the strange impasse France has created for itself.

I don’t even know what to hope for tomorrow. A beleaguered but still somehow very annoying Domenech today suggested that the French team had to try and redeem itself for its unforgivable actions on Sunday by playing well. That’s a nice idea. But I think we are beyond that now. The French team has been a pioneer in many ways over the years, and now they have created a new precedent: a player’s strike at the World Cup. In the midst of it, let’s do ourselves and them the favor of thinking about this the hard way rather than the easy one.

Stefan Lovgren, a documentary filmmaker who has worked on a many previous films about Africa, is now making one about football in Africa. It focuses in particular on one football academy in Ghana to tell a broader story about African football, the hopes and exploitation of footballers, and the broader context surrounding the history 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Lovgren was here filming during our October conference on “Sport, Race and Power,” and interviewed Gerard Akindes, Peter Alegi, Paul Darby, three conference participants, for the film.

He’s shared a few short clips from the film with me, including one that explores how football is being used in Sierra Leone to deal with the effects of years of war there among children, and it looks wonderful! Once I know about when and where the film will be aired, I’ll share more information here.

To learn more about the documentary visit Lovgren’s blog.

Puskas (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0f/Puskas_Ferenc.jpg)

Created in honour of Ferenc Puskás, captain and star of the Hungarian national team during the 1950s, the FIFA Puskás Award will be bestowed upon the player from either the men’s or women’s game judged to have scored the best goal of the year.

The final decision gets determined by FIFA.com users. In making their decision, the FIFA Football Committee applied the following criteria:

1. Aesthetics (a subjective criterion – long-range shots, team moves, acrobatic goals etc)
2. The importance of the match (an objective criterion – in descending order: national teams, continental tournaments, domestic first divisions)
3. The absence of luck or an opposition mistake as a factor making the goal possible
4. Fair Play: the player must not have conducted himself poorly during the game or, for example, have been found guilty of doping
5. The date: goals scored between July 2008 and July 2009

The winner will be unveiled at the FIFA World Player gala on 21 December and the voting will be closed on the 14th of December.

Until the ceremony please make  your choices & explain why you have chosen it:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/OjLKTI5dadc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

My vote goes to Nilmar’s goal in the Internacional-Corinthians match that was played on May 10, 2009… His diagonal run towards the box passing several players and his insistence on scoring is worth seeing. As seeable D’Alessandro’s pass from behind the center line leaves Nilmar as the second player that is closest to the opposite post. He creates his own space and progressively continues with the ball. Obviously, positioning mistakes and lack of communication within the defense can be seen as other reasons  for the goal. A detailed analysis of the goal has been given in the following video:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/_iRiBkcRiV4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Tuttosport of Italy has been publishing a list of U-21 players for its Golden Boy Awards since 2003. The award went to Raffael Van der Vaart in 2003, Wayne Rooney in 2004, Lionel Messi in 2005, Cesc Fabregas in 2006, Sergio Aguero in 2007 and to Anderson last year. 2008 witnessed the tightest competition as Manchester United’s Anderson just got three more votes compared to Arsenal’s Theo Walcott. This year’s following candidates were born on 1^st of February or later.

My bet is on Alexandre Pato. If you want to vote: http://www.tuttosport.com/sondaggi/calcio/vota-595/Vota+il+GOLDEN+BOY+2009

Dominic Adiyah (Fredrikstad FK, Ghana)
Jozy Altidore (Hull City, USA)
Holger Badstuber (Bayern München, Germany)
Gareth Bale (Tottenham Hotspur, Walles)
Mario Balotelli (Internazionale, Italy)

Franco Di Santo (Blackburn Rovers, Argentine)
Giovani dos Santos (Tottenham, Hotspur, Mexico)
Alan Dzagoev (CSKA Moskou, Russia)
Fernando Forestieri (Málaga, Argentine)
Timo Gebhart (VfB Stuttgart, Germany)

Eden Hazard (Lille, Belgium)
Emilio Insua (Liverpool, Argentine)
Stevan Jovetic (Fiorentina, Montenegro)
Simon Kjaer (Palermo, Denmark)
Vladimir Koman (Bari, Hungary)

Bojan Krkic (Barcelona, Spain)
Toni Kroos (Bayer Leverkusen, Germany)
Federico Macheda (Manchester United, Italy)
Marko Marin (Werder Bremen, Germany)
Thomas Muller (Bayern München, Germany)

Iker Muniain (Athletic Bilbao, Spain)
Tomas Necid (CSKA Moskou, Czech Republic)
Alberto Paloschi (Parma, Italy)
Dani Parejo (Getafe, Spain)
Javier Pastore (Palermo, Argentine)

Alexandre Pato (AC Milan, Brazil)
Pablo Piatti (Almería, Argentine)
Miralem Pjanic (Olympique Lyon, Bosnia-Herzegovina)
Andrea Poli (Sampdoria, Italy)
Rodrigo Possebon (Sporting Braga, Brazil)

Rafael Da Silva (Manchester United, Brazi)
Aaron Ramsey (Arsenal, Wales)
Ben Sahar (Espanyol, Israel)
Davide Santon (Internazionale, Italy)
Sidnei (Benfica, Brazil)

Daniel Sturridge (Chelsea, England)
Carlos Vela (Arsenal, Mexico)
Theo Walcott (Arsenal, England)
Danny Welbeck (Manchester United, England)
Franco Zuculini (TSG Hoffenheim, Argentine)