“If he [Adebayor] is on loan, he should be able to play against everybody. That is the only thing I believe. Before, remember, you had a choice. There was a period when you had the choice [of allowing on loan players to play against their parent club] and I never, never refused the choice. I always said ‘yes you can play against us’ even though, one time, we loaned Francis Jeffers and he scored against us. I allowed Jermaine Pennant to play against us with Leeds. I always allowed the players to play. I would allow Nicklas Bendtner to play against us [for Sunderland].”
Is Wenger right? Or is he just bitter that he took a moral stance that in retrospect it seems nobody noticed? A bit of both no doubt, his presumptions that all managers should follow his set of principals often leads to him unreasonably feeling jaded but he does also make a fair point about loan players. How can we claim that our league is fair if certain players are not allowed to play against certain teams? If a club decides to loan out a player then they have to accept that their choice has both advantages and disadvantages. Visions of Sheik Mansour having his cake and eating spring to mind.
If a club were in fact rich enough to not be in a position where they were forced to sell their players then it is even conceivable that they would loan out players instead of selling them for the exact purpose of allowing them to play against their rivals and thus indirectly help their own position in domestic competitions. Clearly this would be an illegality of sorts, to suggest it even sounds mildly outrageous yet whether it is intended or not by the parent club this is exactly what is happening.
You have to consider that clubs that loan players from other clubs often have to pay transfer fees to do so and also have to pay a percentage of, if not all of, the player’s wages. Therefore they must be entitles to use that player against every single team. People talk about changing back to the system of choice that we had before, I say we should go one step further. We should make it compulsory for players who are loaned out to be allowed to play against their parent club. For the sake of competition and fairness in our league it is a necessity.
Follow me on Twitter @H_Mackay
Written by Hamish Mackay for FootballFanCast.com
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