The tug-of-war between Křetínský Sparta and Strnadová Viktoria Plzeň by billionaires for the promising player Matyáš Vojta generated a Bundesliga prize. Neighboring Austria has already pocketed the Czech market.
After the takeover of the West Bohemian club by the richest Czech, Michal Strnad, Adolf Šádek, the executive director of Viktoria, said: “Czech football must recover so that players can be bought again for normal money.”
However, as soon as the January transfer window opened, his call turned into a cry in the dark.
Vojta, a 21-year-old boy who rose from the small Prague club Spartak Praha 4 through Vyšehrad to losses in Mladá Boleslav and in the Czech 21st team, moved from the city of cars to Prague’s Letná for four million euros.
Never before has such a racket between two Czech football entities leaked out.
And that can still increase with bonuses in the future if the winger does well in the red jersey.
Is it an appropriate or artificially inflated price due to the possibilities and ambitions of the rich who took Czech clubs by storm?
“At the moment, it is an exorbitant amount that does not correspond to the current quality of the player,” points out Stanislav Levý, a former league coach and sports director who played and trained in Germany for years.
“For us, the market has deviated from real numbers in this direction. Players don’t even go to smaller Bundesliga clubs for such a price,” he adds.
Let’s confront his opinion with the facts. If we take a look at the list of reinforcements of the less famous Bundesliga clubs in this competition year, we will not find purchases for Vojt’s amount either at all or only a little.
Heidenheim brought mostly free players or those on loan. The most expensive transfer? For 1.5 million euros.
Hamburg did not exceed the threshold of 2.5 million euros. Sparta recently got acquainted with his strictly set management, when the German club did not exercise the option on Adam Karabec for 4.2 million euros. The Germans considered such a knapsack pointless.
Management of St. Pauli allowed themselves to invest four million euros in the twenty-six-year-old forward Martijn Kaars from the second division Magdeburg.
For the same money, 22-year-old offensive midfielder Giovanni Reyna went from Dortmund to Mönchengladbach, and 28-year-old striker Philip Tietz from Augsburg to Mainz.
100 million crowns for Matyáš Vojta would not be lost even among the German football elite.
The row of Czech billionaires has already turned neighboring Austria into a pincer. Teams such as LASK, Rapid Vienna, Sturm Graz, Austria Vienna or Salzburg usually trade players with each other for several hundred thousand to several million euros. It is mostly in the range of 1 to 2 million euros.
Due to the fact that Salzburg regularly sells players to the best clubs in the top European leagues, it can afford to spend higher sums on transfers, but it spends them on foreign acquisitions. At home, he does not engage in crazy financial races.
By the way, when we are comparing the Austrian, German and Czech approach, it is worth mentioning the transfer of the twenty-two-year-old winger William Boving from Sturm Graz to Mainz. He paid 3.5 million euros for it a year ago in January.
When he bought it, the Danish striker had 22 starts for the national team, 2 goals in its colors, 8 appearances in the regular season of the Champions League and 12 in the Europa League.
Before coming to Letná, Vojta played 5 matches in the Conference League, scored once, played 8 times in the Czech national team and scored 1 goal against the Gibraltar youth team. He did not play at the U21 Euros.
Nevertheless, Sparta paid Boleslav a higher amount than the German club to Austrian Graz for the Dane with better numbers.
“The market is moving, but we are ready for it. Our financial strength is such that we stay at the top of this race,” noted František Čupr, Sparta’s executive vice president, at a January press conference.
But the question is whether Sparta behaves sensibly. And whether she was unnecessarily pumped up by Viktoria Plzeň, with whom she fought for Vojta in the finish line.
This is not the first time that this plot has been discussed in the backroom. Even with Albion Rrahmani, it was speculated that Slavia’s feigned interest in him only wanted the summer rival to bend even more in his hunt.
Either way, the billionaires are raising the bar on the Czech transfer market by leaps and bounds. As the Czech-American Boris Korbel did in the famous nineties, when he bought Slavia, and the Slovak metallurgical magnate Július Rezeš after he took control of Sparta.
The first paid 30 million crowns, which was a staggering amount of money at the time, for striker Dragiš Binič, winner of the Champions League with Crvena zvezda Belgrade.
Rezeš also redirected Slovan Bratislava’s Szilárd Neméth to the Leten empire for 30 million.
Now even greater magic can happen. Because there are more billionaire roosters in one dump and none of them wants to lose. With exaggeration, one could say: Whoever doesn’t have a billionaire on their back in the Czech league is slowly no longer in existence.
“The entrance of big billionaires is a lot of clubs where when you come, you can’t touch the players anymore. See Pardubice and other clubs, Olomouc doesn’t even bother with us today,” sighed Václav Brabec, owner of Baník Ostrava, in an interview for Deník.
His record 62 and a half million crowns, which he invested in acquiring midfielder Ondřej Kričfaluši from Slavia, turned into a modest severance fee in the light of the rocket for Vojta. And in comparison with 75 million (roughly 3 million euros) for the transfer of midfielder Michal Beran from Jablonec to Hana, it’s like nothing.
However, as the numbers rise, so does the return risk. In order for the one hundred million Vojta to really pay off for Letenský, he needs to keep selling himself with goals. If possible to the best European leagues.
Scouts and analysts from these spheres would remember him most for his hits in the Champions League. But Slavia, with a seven-point lead, is the closest to a direct ticket to it after the fall. Goals and assists from the European or Conference League are not worth that much.
And there is something else important that decides whether the transfer will be valued in the future or not.
“The first place is always the character of the player,” points out Vlastimil Palička, a former first league coach.
“You can’t just look at whether he can pass, shoot and score a goal. You have to find out in advance how he behaves on the pitch, off it, if he has a team character. For example, Kuchta doesn’t have that mentality, that’s why he went through so many clubs. Even Tomáš Rosický talked about the fact that some players in Sparta lacked hunger and the desire for constant improvement in the autumn. I would say that Sparta also historically lacks that,” adds the experienced coach.
Measured by this meter, how does Vojta beat him? “I can’t judge it objectively, because I don’t know him personally. But from the available information, he appears to me as a humble and healthy self-confident boy. And since he will have better service from his teammates than in Boleslav, he should score more goals in Sparta,” reflects Palička.
“However, in the context of the Hapals and Látals that I coached, it seems to me that the price tags that are currently flying on the domestic transfer market do not correspond to the quality. Maybe billionaires don’t mind, but I’m a different generation,” he shrugs.
Korbel and Rezeš had megalomaniacal plans with Slavia and Sparta, but they never came true. The success of their followers remains to be seen.
