A player's medical file should travel with him

Screening records are treated as club property, which distorts transfer pricing and leaves athletes negotiating about a document they cannot see.

Every professional athlete generates an enormous file, and almost none of them own it. The scans, the baseline screening from three preseasons ago, the notes from an assessment done in a language the player does not read: that material sits on a club server, governed by a data policy the player signed on day one, and it does not follow him out of the door.

Consider what that does to the market. A buying club is asked to commit years of wages to an asset whose history exists mainly as a two-page summary prepared by the party selling it. Rational response: assume the worst, discount the fee, shorten the term. The seller knows the discount is coming and prices the asking figure up to absorb it. Both sides burn weeks and money on due diligence that would be unnecessary if the record simply belonged to the person it describes.

I am aware of the objection. Full portability would expose players with problems and might make them unemployable. I think the opposite is more likely. The current system punishes the average player to protect the exceptional one, because in the absence of evidence every twenty-nine-year-old is treated as a risk. Evidence helps the honest majority.

There is a competitive dimension too. Clubs with the deepest screening operations gather far more on their own players than they can ever gather on a target, which makes them better sellers than buyers and quietly encourages them to trade players at the moment their own data turns. That is not cheating. It is an information advantage created by a records policy, and it is worth more than most scouting departments.

Some leagues have started building shared repositories, usually for concussion history first, because the legal exposure there is obvious. Extending that to musculoskeletal history is technically trivial and politically dead, since it would strip the selling club of its best negotiating fog.

Ask an agent what he would trade for full access to his own client's file. He will laugh, because he has been asking for it for years and being told it is confidential. Confidential from whom, exactly.