This contract was obviously warped by Sanchez being available on a free contract, so he demanded some of his transfer fee as wage.
On such contracts, I think club should ask player to take on some of the risk.
I’m not sure what the right metric is, but if a player is so world class, he should be confident such a clause would never be required. Eg: if he is dropped for 5 consecutive games, his salary drops to a certain level.
clubs somehow need to insure themselves against this Sánchez (potentially DDG) scenario. We are happy to pay you absolute top dollar buy you also have to perform to a minimum standard. Else I would be very wary of buying a fully developed player out of fear that he loses form or motivation.
So, I actually agree with the principle here, but I strongly disagree with myself because this is impossible to enforce for a few reason.
1) Sanchez was given a contract that the club can safely carry. And this is important. Manchester United football club was not put in financial risk by affording Sanchez that contract. Was it a public embarrassment and disruption in the dressing room? For sure. But was it a financial burden to the club outside of a reasonable scope? Probably not.
2) Sanchez already have a number of performance clauses that are all very common in football. Hereunder: Goals, assists, matchday squads, longevity bonus, etc etc. These are present in all player contracts and work as they are intended, an incentive. At the bottom you have the base/guaranteed salary.
3) Sanchez signed a contract that was certainly above domestic compeition, but was it more than he could have gotten in another league with Juve, Madrid or even PSG? We might have secured the player at the players market price. This contract would have been easy for Real Madrid to carry, for example.
4) A player is given a wage based not on a median in a league,or even compared to other players in other clubs. They are being given wages compared to other players in YOUR club. it's also worth noting that Manchester United is a bigger club on all scales than say, Aston VIlla. We pay players based on the companys income, where a set % of yearly income is awarded to player salaries. More income, more wiggle room for contracts with higher ceiling on extensions. Manchester United is not run by amateurs, the players salaries are extremely carefully budgeted, there will be no "we can't afford this and that" because we pay a handful of players x amount of pounds per week. That expenditure is already budgeted.
4.1) There already exists a wage/risk clause in the players contracts, we saw that this season when we did not play in the Champions League. The players wages were cut by a
massive 25%.. This is the club protecting themselves, they don't need to insulate themselves from individual contracts like this.
5) Wage reduction based on individual criteria opens the club up to years of legal infighting. No pay if dropped 5 games? "Was the dropping justified? How was it justified? I'll take it all the way to CAS". "Wages reduced because I haven't scored 10 goals?" "You haven't given me a reasonable opportunity to achive this goal. You will be hearing from my lawyers". And so on. This is nearly impossible to insulate you from becase there is no legal framework that I can think of that will protect clauses like this, it needs to go through the judicial systems to set a precedent. We're talking 10 years at least before it can become a normalized contract feature. And how does that affect transfer markets when a signing club can simply go: "Come here, we don't force you to sign clauses like that".
The Sanchez deal is bad in hindsight because he never delivered. To Manhcester United football club its a bit of public embarrassment and a temporary dent in the wage budget, but ultimately a big fat "oh well, let's move on". It wasn't that bad of a deal when it happened, a bit over the top yes but it had a higher probability of being "just an expensive contract" rather than what we have today.
