“We have to specialize”
©IMAGO
The TM “Transfer Flows” statistics list the leagues from which football players move to the Bundesliga. More than 180 professionals came to the German upper house from the French first division, and there are almost 200 from the English elite league. On Friday this list was enriched by a competition: the Premium Liiga. FC St. Pauli is the first club to bring a player from the Estonian championship into a German professional league – another example of the brown-whites’ unconventional transfer strategy.
“We have to specialize in a segment of countries,” explained St. Pauli head coach Alexander Blessin just a few days ago, when the move of Paide Linnameeskond’s striker Abdoulie Ceesay (20) was just beginning, the first transfer from the Estonian league to a Bundesliga -Club. For the club from the center of Hamburg, football locations that are exotic from a German perspective are particularly productive and irreplaceable.
Coach Blessin, who worked at Union SG in Belgium before moving to the Reeperbahn, said about that league: “If a player has a good season in Belgium, then the players are not affordable for us. Then players can quickly cost five to eight million euros.” When St. Pauli made its most expensive purchase to date, the D-Mark was still in existence. In 2001 – probably in the exuberance of the then very surprising promotion to the Bundesliga – they paid a transfer fee of 1.38 million euros for Uğur İnceman. The venture didn’t pay off back then. Since then, the FCSP has rarely paid millions for a player.
Ceesay demonstrated his goal threat in Estonia. The striker himself is not Estonian, but comes from Gambia, but the Kiezkickers also have a player who comes from the Baltic state in their ranks; Karol Mets. The 31-year-old came to the Elbe via Switzerland from FC Zurich, but a look at the different nationalities in St. Pauli also shows something remarkable. Mets is the only Estonian in the Bundesliga, Ceesay is now the only Gambian. You won’t find a Welshman next to Fin Stevens (21) in the Bundesliga either. The same applies to the two Australians Jackson Irvine (31) and Connor Metcalfe (25). Four different nationalities that cannot be found in any other club is the highest number in the league.
St. Pauli “Bundesliga promoted, but still not a Bundesliga team”
“We have an excellent staff with our chief scout Jan Sandmann and we always communicate that we are concentrating on countries like Estonia,” Blessin said in reference to the surprising name from the Premium Liiga. The waters in which the people of Hamburg have fished in recent years are also diverse: Sweden, Poland, Greece, the North American MLS, England’s third division. The currently sorely missed winger Elias Saad (25), whose transfer was initially laughed at, was found by sports director Andreas Bornemann in the neighborhood at Eintracht Norderstedt in the Regionalliga Nord.
“We are promoted to the Bundesliga, but we are far from being a Bundesliga team. Some people confuse that,” emphasized Bornemann in an interview with Transfermarkt shortly after the start of the season. He is surprised “at what ideas some consultants approach us with. I wonder whether they have any idea where our options end or whether they have dealt with our team.”
“A lot of things surprise us”
Bornemann on the failed transfer from Unions Kemlein
To the interview in the archive
The group of those in the Bundesliga with whom FC St. Pauli sees itself on an equal footing in terms of transfer opportunities is “quite small,” Bornemann continued. “And we generally don’t do so-called ‘advisor transfers’. Together with the coach, we define the player profiles that match our game idea. The scouting department around our chief scout and squad planner Jan Sandmann then identifies and suggests the right players.”
Morgan Guilavogui, who came from the French upper house from RC Lens, moved to Hamburg from a top league. In Bornemann’s opinion, the Hamburgers “probably benefited to some extent from a not so good TV contract in France. Because RC Lens couldn’t qualify for the European Cup this time, the club had to rely on its own squad. This is a typical example of how it can work.”
How it can work and how it must work for the FCSP; According to Bornemann, in addition to its own finances, the club was also restricted from the transfer activities of other clubs. “You hope that the big clubs will restructure their squads and that there will be opportunities for us to sign players that we wouldn’t normally get – but that hasn’t happened to that extent.”
In any case, new signings are not necessarily the method of choice. Bornemann explained: “We have also emphasized in the past when similar departures – Kyereh, Paqarada or Daschner – either a player from our group has to develop and take the next step or we have to compensate for departures by adapting the game idea. We have succeeded in doing this in recent years.”
Weißhaupt is Freiburg’s number 4 in St. Pauli’s squad
St. Pauli has obviously had the opportunity to find something with a club from a top league in recent years at SC Freiburg. In the last ten years, seven players from the sports club have come to Millerntor. With Noah Weißhaupt (23), the next loan player was brought into the squad on Thursday. There are now four players there who came from Freiburg; Philipp Treu (24) and Carlo Boukhalfa (25) as well as Robert Wagner (21), who was on loan for this season before Weißhaupt. In return, St. Pauli sold Kofi Kyereh (28) to Breisgau two and a half years ago for a club record sum of 4.5 million euros.
Millions in income from player transfers have increased at St. Pauli in recent seasons, and yet the club invested little in new signings, which sometimes led to discontent among fans on social media. Bornemann explained in a media interview this week: “After two difficult years, the club has managed to achieve a positive result again. This also had to do with the transfer proceeds for Eric da Silva Moreira and Fabian Hürzeler. I would like to say that we reinvest what we earn through transfers. It’s not always possible the way you want it to be, and we accept that. We hope that hopefully in the future it will no longer be necessary.”