Who Benefits from Loan Deals?

Take a look down squad lists at Championships clubs and you will see quite a few have four or five players on loan. Furthermore this is not a scenario reserved for struggling clubs, quite a few teams doing well also use the loan system. The concept of the loan deal is to benefit both clubs, the parent club gets match fitness into a youth or fringe player, while the club gaining the loan player receives a top quality player at a relatively low cost. Loan fees are now common place -- but the club receiving the player doesn't always have to pay the full wages. Case in point would be the deal for Craig Bellamy at the start of the season, Cardiff are only paying a portion of Bellamy's reported 90k a week wages.

However, there is certainly an argument that suggests that the big clubs are the only real winners on loan deals. For instance a Premier League player may go to a Championship club on loan for the season and have a quite superb time. At the end of the season that player returns to their Premier League team, now they have experience of playing that may result in getting into the Premier League first team or sold for a higher fee, purely due to what he did on loan. Big premier League clubs can loan out a player they don't want and save money on wages and get a loan fee. Otherwise that player would sit around in the reserves until they were sold.

The counter argument is that loan players can be of very high quality that would have cost the Championship club a significant fee to sign. That player may significantly improve the squad and have a major impact on a team winning promotion. An example of this would be someone like Henri Lansbury at Norwich on loan from Arsenal. Remember promotion to the Premier League is said to now be worth '£90million.

The best loan deals are the ones where both clubs benefit. It's important for managers to choose very carefully who they bring in on loan. Signing a new player should be no different from any other type of signing and significant research should go into the process. As a general rule loan players that are young and hungry tend to fare better than the journeymen type. So what do you think? Who really benefits from loan deals?

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