The loan farms: a modern purgatory

by MAX NEWMAN

"A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings, after a time."

On a day late in May 2011, a 17-year-old Brazilian winger called Lucas Piazon sits grinning in a lavish São Paulo dining room. His gawkish head is engulfed by a Justin Bieber-inspired haircut, the rest of him lost in a puffy black coat; it’s the scene of his first substantial interview with the British press. He stares back at the camera and, in a paper-thin voice, expresses a childlike enthusiasm. “I’m excited about playing for Chelsea,” he says. “I guarantee I will give my best for the club and the fans, and help Chelsea be successful.”

The teenager had just secured a pre-contract move to one of the most successful clubs in the world, a club that had been scouting him for over two years. Earlier in 2011, he’d won the South American U-17 Championship with Brazil and scored three goals. The press had dubbed him “The Next Kaka.” Of course, most sensible pundits understood he was a signing for the future. But many around Chelsea - including Piet De Visser, the scout largely responsible for bringing the player to Stamford Bridge - believed Piazon could be featuring for The Blues’ first team within two years. Hopes were justifiably high.

Piazon spent almost a decade on Chelsea’s books. In January 2021, when he left the club to join Portuguese side Braga, he was The Blues’ joint-longest serving player, matched only by Cesar Azpilicueta. By the time of his eventual departure from London, he’d played for seven other clubs. In total, he made three senior Chelsea appearances.

The concept of loaning players to other clubs has existed nearly as long as football itself, although its forms have varied. The practice was almost entirely unregulated in the amateur and early professional days of British football, so players would often jump around willy-nilly in the late 1800s, strutting their stuff for whoever needed - or would pay - them the most. This drew the ire of fans and members of the press alike, and “The loaning and borrowing of players for special matches” was banned in 1898.

This ruling was impermanent. The phenomenon returned out of necessity during the Second World War, and was codified in the Football League in 1966 after another brief period of banishment. This pioneering rule change was more restrictive than modern regulations; clubs were given an allowance of two loans per season, both of which had to be at least three months in length, and negotiated with teams in a different division. Nonetheless, the ruling paved the way for equivalent systems in other nations, and eventually for the worldwide contemporary loan system we know today.

Until the mid-nineties, the endeavour was mostly earnest. For older players, the loan system offered greener pastures, more playing time, and a chance to recoup some value for their parent side. For youngsters, loans were a genuine step in the development process, a sign their owners believed in them and their first-team potential. Largely the system was used as intended: for the benefit of the players themselves.

That was until two seismic developments shook international football. The first came in 1995. That year, a little-known Belgian footballer named Jean-Marc Bosman won a court ruling that would change the sport forever. Suddenly, players at European clubs were now able to join other European clubs for free upon the expiry of their contracts; additionally quotas on EU players were barred, although they could still be applied to players from other continents.

After the Bosman ruling, smaller clubs could no longer hold their key players ransom with exorbitant price tags and face no consequences - a development that was huge for player power, but devastating for clubs without deep coffers. Europe’s powerhouses began biting chunks out of the smaller fish around them, plucking their best players with ever-increasing ease. Wealth and talent gaps ballooned; without tight registration laws, giants stockpiled talent, and sent huge swathes out on loan. Loans were still largely developmental, but the care that had once been provided to every prospect was diluted: they lost a sense of intimacy.

In the early 2010s, the second development arrived with the introduction of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play Regulations. In the wake of excess spending by football clubs in the 2000s that led to widespread fiscal difficulties, rules were established that prevented teams from spending significantly more than their earnings over a period of several years. The new laws, in theory, should have curbed the bottomless spending powers of the juggernauts. In reality, the draw of talent accumulation was too much, and clubs refused to eschew the delight of stockpiling. They needed to find a way to continue to dominate player acquisition while keeping the books balanced, and it was no surprise where they turned.

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After a solid U-17 World Cup showing, Lucas Piazon arrived on British shores in the summer of 2011. The scrutiny was intense, but at first things seemed to go to plan. Before he turned eighteen he was a regular in the Premier Reserve League, netting four times in 10 games in 2011/12. His goal in a 4-0 demolition of Arsenal’s reserves was a highlight; Piazon toyed with two defenders on the edge of the box, jinked through them, and passed the ball into the near corner of the net with a magnetic kind of nonchalance. Off the pitch, he seemed to be acclimatising to the dressing room, speaking publicly about his immediate connection with Chelsea’s Brazilian contingent.

Piazon received a work permit on his birthday in January of 2012. Less than a week later, he received a new five-year contract; five days after that, he was on the bench for Chelsea’s first team against Swansea. After a match against Manchester United in early February, when Piazon was once again present on the sidelines, Chelsea gaffer Andre Villas-Boas declared he had “high hopes” for the Brazilian. Piazon was ahead of schedule; it seemed a matter of when, not if, he would break through for good.

Piazon featured heavily for Chelsea throughout pre-season in the summer of 2012. By then, the London side had a new manager in Roberto Di Matteo, but the Italian was just as impressed as his predecessor. “He’s been very impressive in training and in friendly games […] he is certainly one to watch for the future,” he said. In a July interview with Sky, Piazon himself seemed optimistic he would feature for the first team during the coming season. “I hope to be with the main group, to train with them every day,” he said. His prayers were answered. In late September, Piazon started Chelsea’s third round League Cup fixture against Wolves. He notched a goal involvement within eight minutes, dishing out a delicious cutback for Ryan Bertrand to smash home in an eventual 6-0 win.

It wasn’t his only goal involvement that season. In December, Piazon made his Premier League debut in an 8-0 demolition of Aston Villa, coming on as a substitute in the 74th minute. Around 60 seconds later, he was sliding an exquisite ball through to his countryman Ramires, who added Chelsea’s fifth goal of the night. When he played, he delivered.

These two games, plus another substitute showing in a League Cup encounter against Manchester United, would be the attacking midfielder’s only first-team appearances for Chelsea in the first half of 2012-13. He was clearly talented, but a logjam of senior talent kept him from The Blues’ starting XI. And it began to take its toll: he spoke of a “complicated environment” at the club that was adding “a lot of pressure.”

He needed playtime, and new manager Rafael Benitez (Chelsea’s third in a year) knew it. The solution seemed straightforward: a brief stint at a competitive club to grow his confidence and experience before a return to the Premier League. When Champions League side Malaga enquired about a loan until the end of the season, neither Chelsea’s higher-ups nor the player thought twice. His arrival was announced on January 17, and he made his debut against FC Barcelona in the Copa del Rey a few days later. He seemed happy after the game, uninhibited. “I like the way football is played here,” he said. “I feel more secure here. I want to play and have opportunities to grow.”

Lucas Piazon was the 31st player loaned out by Chelsea in 2012/13, and he would not be the last. It was a summative number that had only grown season-on-season; by mid-January in 2010, Chelsea had a total loan cohort of 14, a figure that was by far the highest it had ever been. By 2015-16, Chelsea would send out 33 players on temporary deals in the summer alone. The Blues weren’t unique; the number of outgoing loan deals by moneyed clubs across Europe had skyrocketed.

The shift was primarily influenced by finance. With the need to raise funds more pertinent than ever thanks to FFP, decision-makers around Europe slowly began adopting a maximalist approach to loaning. In practice, it looked like this: academy graduates and purchased talents who were not quite ready for first-team football would be siphoned into a “loan farm,” where they’d be sent out on short-term deals to clubs who would, in theory, offer them playing time. Ideally, the player would impress, improve, and return ready to challenge for a spot at their parent club. If they needed more time, the player would be loaned out again, taking another step towards the eventual goal of breaking through. And if that breakthrough never came, the player would continue to be loaned out until they had built enough value to be sold for profit. The clubs would get cash to put towards their FFP targets, and the players would receive new, better-fitting homes.

It was a widespread phenomenon. Chelsea’s Premier League rivals Manchester City were also cavalier, consistently loaning out upwards of 20 players per season in the 2010s. Other European leagues hopped on the bandwagon, especially Serie A; in 2015-16, Juventus loaned out an astonishing 65 players.

But Chelsea did it like no other. The practice was largely kickstarted by Michael Emenalo, the club’s Technical Director from 2011 to 2017. Utilising an extensive global scouting network and owner Roman Abramovich’s connections to other clubs (in particular, Dutch side Vitesse), Emenalo pioneered an uber-functional loan farm in London that attracted sizeable swathes of cash to Stamford Bridge. From the summer window of 2011 to the summer window of 2017, Chelsea signed nearly 40 players who would each make five or less first-team league appearances. From those players they made a total profit of almost £40million. Others, like Thibaut Courtois, Kurt Zouma and Andreas Christensen, became first-team regulars after initial loan spells. Emenalo defended the system in 2013. “The loan process at Chelsea has become very professional and a good deal of thought has gone into it,” he said, “[…] we keep a close eye on [the players] and the manager knows exactly what is happening at all times.”

Lucas Piazon’s loan to Malaga was, by all accounts, successful; he made valuable substitute appearances and created a couple of assists. Upon his return to Chelsea, he was loaned out again to Vitesse, where he was fantastic: the Brazilian youngster, then 20 years old, piled on 19 goal involvements in 28 games. He had fallen out of the starting lineup by the end of the season, but it was still a remarkable return.

Then he was loaned out again, this time to Eintracht Frankfurt in the Bundesliga. In an interview with Bleacher Report in the summer of 2014, Piazon seemed optimistic, stating his years of globetrotting were aiding his development. But signs of doubt had started to appear. “I need more improvement if I want to play for Chelsea. If I don’t impress, I will never play for Chelsea,” he said.

It was a disturbing possibility for the young attacking midfielder, and became prophetic. The Frankfurt loan would be the third of seven: he would later play for Reading, Fulham, Serie A’s Chievo Verona, and the Primeira Liga’s Rio Ave before eventually leaving London for good in 2021. He never donned Chelsea blue in a competitive fixture again. Today, he plays for Wieczysta Krakow, a club in the Polish Ekstraklasa.

Over the years, the early positivity Piazon expressed for Chelsea’s loan farm began to fade. By 2016, he was openly criticising his purgatory. "I'm tired of moving abroad,” he said in the fall of that year, after securing a loan deal with Fulham. “One, two, three loans, maybe that's enough. It's time for me to stay somewhere for more than one year […] it makes no sense to go on loan all the time. It is not good for any player in my experience — or the experience of the other boys […] to be in a different place every year is not good for me at 22.”

Despite it all, Piazon still harboured hopes of featuring for Chelsea’s first team as late as 2017. “I came to Europe to play for Chelsea so if one day they want me there, I would be very happy,” he said. But it never happened, and by the time he signed for Braga in 2021, he was scathing. “At first, I felt really good,” he said upon his exit. “I went through the under-23s, got to the first team and, even in the first loans, I felt Chelsea had expectations and interest in me […] later, as time passed, I became just another business for them. They send me out on loan with the expectation of selling me and making some money with me. I think that’s more or less what they think.”

Worse, Piazon insinuated Chelsea had been deceptive. “We would go to pre-season with the new coach and the new players were coming in from the summer and they were always like, ‘if you do well the coach might keep you,’ he said. “But deep down inside we knew that we didn't have a chance because they were paying big money for the players and the club would definitely use them […] We knew that we would be there for three, four or five weeks and they would then try to send us out on loan again.”

Piazon was a victim of, in his own words “business,” the oft-detached nature of Chelsea’s loan farm system. He’d been put through the wringer of broken promises, and came out on the other side with his development curtailed and a career that would never recover. He was not alone. Todd Kane, a right-back who joined Chelsea’s youth academy at the age of 8, made the senior team in 2012 - but seven years later and after eight loans, left for good in 2019. Like Piazon, his dip in optimism over time was noticeable; he defended the loan system in an interview with The Standard in 2016, but had changed his tune three years later: “I don’t know where I’ll be living and that’s horrible,” he said. “I’m getting to the stage where I want to settle. It’s difficult. I’m very open to going abroad. Whatever’s the best pathway, I’m open.”

Nigerian centre-back Kenneth Omeruo echoed these sentiments in 2017, on the tail end of his fifth loan spell away from London after signing with the Chelsea youth team five years prior. "You have no idea how frustrating it is to always go out on loan,” he said. He’d have to endure two more temporary spells before eventually signing a permanent deal abroad in 2019.

Similar systems have elicited negative emotions elsewhere. Andros Townsend left Tottenham on loan nine times between 2009 and 2016; although he has fond memories from these stints, he also admitted the turbulence contributed to a brief but intense gambling addiction. Abroad, too, loan farms have come under scrutiny from unwilling participants. American ex-wonderkid Freddy Adu, loaned out four times in three years while contracted to Benfica, described the ordeal as “one of the most difficult things to go through as a young player.” And Italian forward Samuele Longo, sent out on temporary deals by Inter Milan a whopping 11 times between 2011 and 2020, later reflected on the decade with bitterness. “This [a permanent move] is what I wanted for a long time,” he said, upon signing with Vicenza. “Am I a victim of capital gains? I don’t know, I have certainly been linked to Inter for too long. These continuous loans never helped me […] All these changes did not depend on me but Inter.”

Of course, loan spells can and do still work to the benefit of a young player’s career. Harry Kane, one of the greatest players the English game has ever seen, was once a loan warrior, spending time at Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich, and Leicester City between 2011 and 2013. Morgan Rogers, the bolt-in-the-blue attacking midfielder who recently became the most expensive English footballer ever after a £117million move to Chelsea from Aston Villa, began his career amongst the Manchester City loan army. Between 2021 and 2023, Rogers had short stints at Lincoln City, Blackpool, and Bournemouth, to varying success. In an interview with The Times last year, Rogers said that this tumultuous time helped him “find [himself] as a player.”

“I had to find that out in the lower leagues — what works in a professional game, because what works in academy football and the way you play in academy football is not the same in League One or the Championship,” he said. “Those experiences helped me become the player I am, because the player I am now is not who I was as an academy player, or at Man City. I had to learn that on the fly, really, how [in the EFL] it’s completely different to academy football, and how I had to use my strengths in a different way to be successful.”

Loan successes are not reserved for those who enjoyed a career explosion as a result, either. English goalkeeper Jamal Blackman, for instance, made exactly 0 appearances during a nine-year stint at Chelsea between 2012 and 2021. But in an interview with The Athletic in 2020, he still seemed generally happy at being whisked around so frequently. “It does feel like I’ve been on the road a lot…but everywhere I’ve gone has been very welcoming. I like travelling and seeing new places, anyway. I’ve played in other countries which is a positive. It does help. I am moving a lot but you get settled.”

Three years later and two years after his time at Chelsea had come to a terminal close, he seemed just as balanced. “[Going out on loan] from a big club can be a good thing and a bad thing, you learn to ride out that perception of coming from a big club creating big expectations. It gives you that reassurance that not everyone is going to have a good loan — but as a player you’re a young person starting their career. You get thrown into men’s football and that environment where three points means a lot to a lot of people and that’s a big change from the academy environment. Loans are really important.”

There have not been many empirical studies conducted on the effectiveness of loan dealings, but the published few have varied in their findings. Some have been scathing: Niklas Günter and Lars Vischer analyzed 378 loan transfers from Bundesliga clubs between 2010 and 2022, and found there wasn’t a “statistically significant difference” in transfer value for individuals before and after a loan. “No one,” they concluded, “seems to benefit directly from the loan deal.”

But the majority of the research points to a more nuanced reality, with one, overarching through-line: communication. Enzo Olde Wobers’s 2022 study, Sending Foucault On Loan to the Lower Leagues, found that when the parent club was clear, concise, and caring with their words and actions surrounding loan deals, the stint itself was more enjoyable for the player. Unfortunately, transparency and kindness are rare. One player discovered he was to be loaned out through the local newspaper; another had his temporary deal extended without his knowledge. A subject of the study recalled: “I remember when I found out that I was not playing for Club B that weekend at Club D, I almost felt like I was running around trying to get answers.”

This sense of being left in the dark can be found in many of football’s most disastrous public loan anecdotes, especially pertaining to individual destinations. Former Manchester City defender Erik Palmer-Brown was told feeder club Troyes were looking for a player in his position when he was loaned there in 2021; he was later informed by the French side’s manager that his presence wasn’t wanted. Although Palmer-Brown’s stint was salvaged by a change in manager, the aforementioned Freddy Adu was not as lucky back in 2010: after refusing a pay cut from his temporary club Aris Thessaloniki, he was axed from the first-team squad and left hanging by parent team Benfica. “My parent team could have been like, ‘you know what, we’ll bring him back,’” Adu said in 2011. “But they didn’t want to take on the responsibility of paying me, either.”

While the loan gurus of clubs around Europe, such as the aforementioned Emenalo of Chelsea, often claim communication is constant and clear at their club, the words of the players themselves sometimes suggest otherwise. Discussing his loan spell in Germany (which immediately followed his stint at Vitesse), Piazon noted: “It was a completely different world because the German league is totally different from the Dutch league. […] The way they wanted to play, what the coach wanted from me in one place and what the coach wanted from me in the other place –– it took time to adapt and to adjust to what he wants and what the team wants.”

A 2022 study by Sofie Kent, Rich Neil, and Robert Morris came to similar findings pertaining to the negative effects of this footballing ethos incongruence. They also found that the implied temporal pressure of having to make an instant mark, the “culture shock” of independent daily life, and “[threats] towards ambitions of performing within higher leagues due to no longer competing against or performing with team mates deemed to be skilful” all had adverse impacts on loan spells.

When loans succeed, a sense of control seems to be a consistent trend. In an interview with the Athletic, then-Chelsea fullback Dujon Sterling said that he gained a lot of confidence from having a say where he went on loan. “The first thing is me, my agent and my mother find where is best for me to go […] Then we go to Chelsea and say which we think is the best place. We’ll take Chelsea’s input but it has to be an agreement.” Olde Wobers’ research backs up this individual observation: players seem most likely to enjoy their loans, and therefore revel in them, when they are being treated as a human on an equal plane to their employers, with a potent sense of agency.

A few factors contributed to these positive feelings. From a more logistical point of view, players who already had secured contracts with their parent club noted an increased sense of freedom during their loans. “It was a bit of a weight off cause I didn’t really need to be proving myself to anyone, at least for another year. It was good to go and play a game knowing I had the contract sorted,” said a 20-year-old member of Wobers’s study. In fact, pointed and regular contact was often enough. A player who was treated with this courtesy noted: “If I needed [the parent club], I would have rung them but the support they gave me was top quality. They checked up on me quite a lot which was very nice of them just to have a bit of a chitchat.” And another in a similar situation concurred: “After every game my goalkeeper coach, Mark, he would either ring me or text me to see how I’d done or what the result was. He’d come to the games every couple of months or every month. There’s still contact there and I was still getting feedback as to how I was doing and also the loan clubs I’d be at would report back and say how I was doing as well.”

Over the last few years, the loan system has undergone a limited reform worldwide. FIFA stepped in a few years ago with a slew of limits on loan numbers, both in total and between individual clubs. And there were tangible, positive results: clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea, for instance, have notably scaled back their enormous loan farms in the last couple of years.

Unfortunately, these novel caps only apply to players over the age of 21, meaning footballers in the midst of key developmental years are still largely unprotected against loan farming. An uptick in multi-club systems, too, has also created an environment rife with quasi-loans: players sent to feeder clubs on ostensibly permanent deals, which serve as trial runs for the larger clubs further up the food chain. There’s a sense that loan farming, as many knew it, has not entirely disappeared, but has merely evolved.

A sensible next step would be to make the new loan limits universal, regardless of age. In their article The Requirement For Transformation of the Loan System in Football, Hitesh Mallick, Nandigosh Karan Nanda, and Sidheswar Sahoo suggested as much, in particular calling for restrictions on feeder club loans and loans for players bought in the same season. In reality, any such changes will be a long time coming, if they ever do. Immediate reform must come from within. And it could start with a simple act: listening.

Football relies excessively upon top-down principles, eschewing the autonomy of players further with each passing day. In coaching, transfer dealings, and contract negotiations, the young footballer is told others know best; higher-ups and executives are the great arbiters of their careers, and they’re moved around like pawns on a chessboard. One can’t help but feel loan farms are key to an inherently reductionist philosophy, requiring the player’s humanity to be flattened until it can be contained on paper. Specialist hierarchies are vital, and young players free to make uneducated or naïve decisions on their futures would make disastrous mistakes: but it’s rare to find a young player who is happy to have their future traded like a stock, and unhappy, unsettled, unmoored footballers aren’t much good to anyone. Discontent stifles development, dilutes the value of an asset and, more importantly, disrupts the dreams of a young person in a cut-throat industry.

Something, somewhere, must give. A better balance must be found between direction and autonomy. Some players will want the decision taken out of their hands entirely, to defer their development to their employers, and that should always be their prerogative. But all relationships are about power, and it’s hard not to conclude that for the past two decades, the balance has swung too far towards well-resourced clubs who have little incentive to treat their young, loan-ready prospects as anything more than a financial asset. A healthy future for the loan system requires more personal autonomy, less dictation, and more communication, so no young person is ever left in the dark.

You can still find the footage of Lucas Piazon’s assist against Aston Villa on that winter’s day in 2012. He receives a slipped ball from Eden Hazard just inside the opponent’s half after a scything run beyond the midfield line. There is a languid moment of ball control and then Piazon is off, with two gorgeously direct, in-cutting touches that place him on the precipice of the opponent’s final third. When the final ball comes, it slithers, dripping with panache, sliding perfectly into the path of Ramires. It’s a pass that leaves the receiver with little to do but score.

When Ramires turns around to celebrate, he makes a beeline straight to his young teammate. So do David Luiz and Oscar; the three wrap Piazon into a Brazilian embrace as more Chelsea players join them, each delighted to celebrate their teenage peer. And between the press of his friends, Lucas Piazon’s face peeks out, boyish and floppy-haired, etched with a small smile as if he’s struggling to soak it all in. He came hundreds of miles from home, left his family, risked it all, for this.

“Take courage, my heart: you have been through worse than this."