No doubt there are more than a few of us who feel a twinge of nostalgia when the mind goes back to the days when David Hirst was one of the more dynamic strikers in the country and, as unimaginable as it may seem in today’s game, the times when it wasn’t so easy for the elite clubs to snaffle up all the best players.
Hirst once held the record for the fastest recorded shot in history, hitting the bar at 114 mph in a game against Arsenal at Highbury in September 1996. His 128 goals for Sheffield Wednesday brought him England caps, the devotion of their supporters and an unsuccessful attempt from Alex Ferguson to arrange a transfer to Manchester United. That didn’t work out too badly for Ferguson, who had to make do with some fellow by the name of Eric Cantona, but it is easy to understand why Hirst is revered at Hillsborough as one of the most popular players ever to wear the club’s colours. Ferguson’s autobiography sums up what he thought of the player. “I was even keener on Hirst than on [Alan] Shearer,” he writes.
Some of that precious magic also appears to have rubbed off on Hirst’s son, George, judging by the reports from those who have seen the teenager greedily accumulating goals at the various age levels. Hirst Jr was described in the Sheffield Star recently as “arguably the most exciting, talented youngster to emerge from the club’s academy in decades”. He made his first-team debut at 17 and, for the football romanticists among us, there was something rather delightful about seeing that surname on the back of a blue-and-white striped shirt again.
He also gave the impression he would wear it with distinction, scoring 40 times across the different age levels two seasons ago and finishing as the joint leading scorer in the Toulon Tournament won by England Under-20s. Manchester United and Everton were reputedly among the clubs monitoring him but it was Leicester who showed the strongest interest. City made three separate bids last August and the final offer, with add-ons included, was reported to be around £2m. Which isn’t bad money for someone whose first-team career at that stage amounted to two substitute appearances totalling 41 minutes.
All of which makes it perplexing, a year on, that Hirst is now preparing for Oud-Heverlee Leuven’s latest assignment in Belgium’s B division, with a relatively unknown club that get on average 5,000 supporters for home games. Until, perhaps, you dig a little deeper and examine why Den Dreef, their 10,020-capacity stadium, has been renamed to incorporate King Power into its title, why the same sponsor now adorns the players’ shirts and all the other links between OH Leuven and a certain club from the east Midlands.
The background here is that Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, Leicester’s owner, launched his takeover of OH Leuven in June last year. The two clubs have worked in tandem ever since and, when it comes to Hirst, here’s the thing: there is a considerable difference between how much a foreign club has to pay in compensation for an out-of-contract player from England and the amount that Leicester would need to fork out. For OH Leuven, it will be no more than £150,000. And Leicester? Hirst has been at Hillsborough since the age of 12 and if you were to look through the other tribunals arranged by the Professional Football Compensation Committee – one example being Ethan Ampadu going from Exeter to Chelsea for £2.5m – the fee could easily have been 20 times more than Leicester’s sister club had to pay.
Ever had the feeling you’ve been had? Let’s be clear here that no rules have been broken and, however fishy you or I might think it is, others might consider it a smart piece of business, operating in a ruthless industry, if a loophole is being exploited so Leicester, very much the big sister of this relationship, can take the player off OH Leuven and circumnavigate the usual compensation.
All the same, it is also fair to say Hirst’s previous club could be forgiven for feeling aggrieved if, as strongly suspected, he eventually ends up 70 miles or so down the M1. There are already a couple of Leicester players on loan with OH Leuven. The Leicester chief executive, Susan Whelan, and the director of football, Jon Rudkin, were appointed to OH Leuven’s board at the time of the takeover and the Premier League club have even sent over a groundsman to improve the Belgians’ playing surface. Heck, Nigel Pearson is the OH Leuven first-team manager. Pearson, of course, is the former Leicester manager. He is also an old teammate of David Hirst at Hillsborough and a long-time family friend. It is a cosy arrangement but not one, you will have to appreciate, that appeals to many Wednesday supporters, judging by the email I received from one describing it as “a sleazy way of prying young English talent away from the club that developed him”. Owls Talk, one of their internet messageboards, has 126 pages devoted to the subject.
All that can be said with certainty is that Wednesday could have done with the money, particularly as the club have been under a transfer embargo since April. In hindsight, maybe they will reflect they should have accepted Leicester’s offer and, if we are taking sides, they lose a certain amount of sympathy because of the contract dispute that concluded with Hirst, in effect, being frozen out during his final year with the club.
But there is a principle here as well and if Hirst does turn up at Leicester, whenever that may be, it will tell us a lot about the politics and relationships that exist in modern football, the vagaries of the feeder-club system and a loophole that should probably be closed.
Plus it could be your club that gets hurt next time. Imagine, for example, if Chelsea had decided not to go after Ampadu in the orthodox fashion and left it to Vitesse Arnhem, their feeder club, to offer the player a contract, give him a year in the Netherlands and then quietly move him to Stamford Bridge. Next time, maybe Chelsea will do exactly that and save themselves a few quid in the process. Exeter were already unhappy with the tribunal’s verdict, believing the player to be worth substantially more, but Chelsea could have signed Ampadu, in theory, for only a fraction of that amount if they had juggled everything around. Or maybe it will be Manchester City exploiting this loophole by bringing Girona, one of their feeder clubs, into the equation. Why pay through the nose when another club can get the same player for peanuts and hand him over at a later date?
Not that it is just the smaller clubs who might feel vulnerable. In 2012 Tottenham were so keen on Zeki Fryers, who was approaching the end of his contract at Manchester United, they arranged a trial and took him on a club tour to Portugal. United wanted up to £6m from a tribunal but Spurs suddenly backed away, leaving Standard Liège to pick up the player for only £250,000 because of the different compensation process abroad. The following January, Fryers moved to White Hart Lane for around £900,000, prompting one of those press conferences with Ferguson when it was tempting to think the then United manager might spontaneously combust.
It was, he blazed, a “blatant manipulation of the system”. Ferguson wanted an inquiry and his relationship with the Spurs chairman, Daniel Levy, was never the same again. “The Premier League should look into it and I think they should stop the registration until they examine it. There will be a trail, mobile phone [records] or something. It is obvious to me. It’s a Daniel Levy deal … it’s his fingerprints all over it. It’s the kind of thing we expected he was going to do.” Spurs, who had no official link to the Belgian club, vehemently denied it being a carve-up. Their explanation was that Fryers was homesick and had dropped out of the first-team plans in Liège.
Is the Hirst case a blatant manipulation of the system? Leicester have chosen not to comment. OH Leuven have taken the same policy. The feedback I get, though, is that they understand how it looks and appreciate that questions will be asked.
We will have to see how it turns out but it is a shame, more than anything, that one Hirst will be remembered at Wednesday so differently to the other. Dad has been advising son and, in that process, his relationship with the club has also been damaged. Hirst Sr is said to have quit his hospitality role at Hillsborough. Everyone appears to be blaming one another and the bottom line is that it would not be a huge surprise to see the player in question, now 19, in Leicester’s colours one day. Sometimes, as Gareth Southgate once said, it is easy to love this game without necessarily liking it.