The period of austerity seems to be over in football. The lateral hire is on the rise as players are swapping teams at a steadily increasing rate. It starts with the star players and the big teams, but soon enough the pay rates across the market will be pushed up and mediocre players will start costing the smaller teams big money.

As teams fight for survival in a competitive environment they start to lose focus on what their key purpose is (to please the fans) and chase the big annual prize at any cost. Soon costs spiral and the fan is squeezed of more and more money to pay for the increased cost of players and the need to get the big annual prize. Worse happens as the teams lose focus on what the fans want and start to employ different approaches that get them closer to the annual prize, but by reducing the quality of the end product they alienate their fans.

But at the end of the day shouldn’t it be about pleasing the fans and keeping the costs for them down? After all wasn’t that the reason all these teams started in the first place?

Don’t panic! I haven’t turned this blog into a sports blog, just re-read the above and substitute the words in italic. Replace football with legal, player with lawyer, team with firm and fan with client.

There seems to be a lot of movement in legal at the moment (examples here, here and here), combine this with an increasingly competitive market and there’s a lot lawyers could take from the modern football market.

Maybe rather than chasing the Balotelli’s the teams should look at their development programmes and start bringing on the next Giggs?  And on the United theme, don’t assume that just because you’re a BigLaw “Manchester United” that your fans will be happy regardless!