New insurance package for star players

An injury to a top player can be a nightmare for a club. It can affect team performance, final league position and revenue from prize money for the Premier League and Champions League. Finishing outside the Champions League places can cost a team more than £30m in guaranteed prize money alone.

A case in point would be the broken leg suffered by Arsenal striker Eduardo da Silva in 2008. Bought for £12m, the injury put him out of the game for nearly a year and he never regained his former sharpness. He was sold for £6m in 2010.

Now three Premiership clubs have come up with a new insurance product in consultation with Axa, Swiss Re, Munich Re and other leading insurers. The policy protects the club not just from losses suffered from the reduced transfer value of the player, but also from the impact of the player’s absence on revenues linked to team performances. How this will be calculated is not clear.

Existing policies only compensate clubs for wages paid to long-term injured players. Other policies cover clubs in the event of an injury forcing a player into retirement or such rare events as multiple players dying in a catastrophe.

The new policy will cover injuries that keep a player out of the game for more than 60 days or illness judged bad enough to damage the player’s market value. One point of contention is likely to be settling cover for an injury prone player.

The policies are not likely to be cheap and being marketed to Europe’s top 40 clubs. The amount that can be paid out is capped at £100m a season.