A failed medical is usually a price negotiation

Screening at the point of transfer rarely stops a deal outright; it moves the fee, the wages and the risk onto somebody else.

The phrase "failed his medical" is one of the most misleading things in sports reporting. Very few transfers collapse because a doctor said no. What actually happens is that a screening report lands, the buying club's lawyers read it, and a deal that was worth a certain fee last night is worth ten per cent less this morning, with more of the money pushed into appearance-based instalments.

The medical is a negotiation instrument. Both sides know this going in. The selling club schedules it late, when the player has already been photographed at the airport and the buyer has already absorbed the reputational cost of walking away. The buyer counters by making the report as detailed as possible, because every finding is a lever, and the findings will be plentiful in any professional athlete over twenty-six.

Here is my uncomfortable view. This is not a scandal. It is a functioning risk market doing what risk markets do, and it is probably better for players than the alternative, which is clubs refusing to sign anyone with history at all. Structured instalments let a player with a repaired knee get a contract that a flat fee would never have supported.

What is unhealthy is the information asymmetry underneath it. Screening data collected by a selling club belongs, in most jurisdictions and most league regulations, to that club. What gets handed over at transfer is a summary, not the underlying record. So the buyer is pricing risk from an edited file, and the discount they demand is padded to cover what they suspect was left out. The player pays for that padding in guaranteed money.

An open, portable medical record would shrink that padding. It would also expose clubs who have been quietly managing a chronic problem, which is precisely why the idea keeps dying in committee.

Watch the structure of the next big deal reported as a bargain. Look at how much is fixed and how much is contingent on games played. That ratio is the medical report, made public without anyone breaching confidentiality.