I was thinking recently that one of the challenges for Portuguese football these days is that it can’t rely as heavily on transfer income from selling South American talent to other European leagues.

Portugal used to be the destination of choice for young South American footballers particularly Brazilians. Porto and the other big Portugese clubs often developed them and then sold them on for very healthy profits. Think of guys like Falcao, James Rodríguez, Anderson, Hulk, Danilo, Jackson and Alex Sandro, all amongst the most expensive transfers in world football at the time they left the club.

These days though you don’t see Portugese clubs being able to do as many of those deals. The Premier League in particular are happy to go direct to source and buy young South Americans, cutting out the middle man. That’s a significant revenue loss!

Even the fees you’re getting for guys like Luis Diaz (54mil Euro) are pretty low by comparison to what the club sold other Colombian talent for. James Rodríguez and Falcao’s fees in 2014 and 2012 would be the equivalent of 80 - 100 million Euros in the current market.

The very wealthy leagues like the EPL and Saudi Pro League are just bullying clubs like Porto into selling players at ok prices but not the kind of massive deals that were getting done