The transfer window has a free tier

By 2030 the sale of a professional footballer could depend less on his form than on which subscription plan his club has paid for. Under a scheme of the kind now being pitched by data providers, clubs on the free tier would list their players in public, in text, and wait. One such listing might read as follows.

Professional football clubs increasingly rely on data analytics and algorithmic player valuation in recruitment, and the scouting platforms they use are typically sold on tiered subscriptions that determine how much data a club can see. Transfer negotiations still take place between people, but valuation models, video databases and player-marketplace platforms now shape who is approached and at what price. Smaller clubs often cannot afford the same tools as wealthier ones, which widens the information gap in the transfer market. Software subscriptions with free, standard and premium tiers have become the default business model for such tools.

FOR SALE. Central midfielder, 27, 1.81 m, left-footed. 34 league appearances last season, three goals, one owner since academy. Full injury history available on request. Runs. Contract to June 2031, wage negotiable, 15 per cent sell-on clause non-negotiable. Would suit ambitious side in a higher division or similar. Serious enquiries in writing to the Club Secretary, Room 2, Main Stand, Tuesdays and Thursdays 10–2. No agents. No time-wasters. Player is aware of this listing and would prefer somewhere near his mother.

The notice would appear under the free tier of a transfer platform of the kind now being pitched to clubs in the lower divisions. A club that did not pay would still be able to sell players; it would simply have to do so in public, in plain text, with a sixty-character headline and no photograph. Paid tiers would add private negotiation, a valuation model and a feature the pricing page would describe as 'deadline acceleration'. The free tier would also carry advertising, mostly for the paid tiers.

The Standard tier, at a monthly fee roughly equal to a reserve goalkeeper's wage, would let a club's negotiating agent, which is software, exchange offers with the buying club's agent, which is also software, at any hour of the day. The Professional tier would let a club see what the other side's model believed the player was worth, a figure the platform would call 'indicative' and the industry would treat as scripture. The Enterprise tier, priced on request, would let a club's agent decline an offer before it had been made. Clubs on the free tier would receive offers by post.

Kieran Moss, the midfielder in question, would learn of his listing from a teammate who had read it in the club shop. 'I don't mind the bit about running,' he would say. 'I do run. I'd have liked them to put good in the air, but the secretary said we were over the word count.' His mother, Lorraine, would photograph the notice and forward it to three relatives, one of whom would reply to ask whether the sell-on clause applied to her.

At a club two divisions higher, on the Professional tier, the listing would surface in an 'opportunities feed' between a goalkeeper in Belgium and a promotional offer for the Enterprise tier. The club's recruitment model would rate Moss as an 'undervalued asset with a limited resale ceiling', which Adrian Kettle, its head of recruitment, would describe as the kindest thing the model had said about anyone in April. The club's agent would draft an offer at eleven at night. The free-tier club would receive it on Thursday, in Room 2, on paper, from a woman called Dawn.

Negotiation between a Professional-tier model and a woman with a biro would proceed at the pace of the slower party. Dawn Pritchard, the club secretary, would counter by letter; the model would respond within four seconds and then wait eleven days for the post. Under the scheme a free-tier club would be entitled to one 'valuation hint' per window, which in Moss's case would read, in full: 'More.' The platform's help centre would explain that the hint was generated by the same model the buying club was paying for, and that upgrading would reveal the rest of the sentence.

A trade association for lower-league clubs would say it had 'no objection in principle' to tiered access, noting that most of its members had sold players by fax within living memory and had found the arrangement broadly workable. Its chair would add that the free tier had one advantage the paid ones lacked, which was that the player could read it. Moss would eventually move, for a fee slightly above the hint, to a club forty minutes from his mother's house. The listing would stay live for a further six weeks, because nobody on the free tier could take it down.