De Bruyne Transfer

Earlier this year, when the English Premier League signed a new television rights deal worth somewhere between 7 and 9.5 billion euros, the ramifications for the entire football world weren't immediately apparent. With the completion of Kevin de Bruyne's transfer to Manchester City, it's become clear that the EPL's windfall is going to affect clubs everywhere - and not necessarily always in a positive sense.

Wolfsburg and Man City aren't talking about the 24-year-old Belgian playmaker's official price tag, but it's rumored to be around 74 million euros. In any case, it's a huge cupcake of money with more money for frosting and money on top instead of a cherry. Wolfsburg will be spending some of that sum in an attempt to compensate for the loss of the Bundesliga's player of the year last season and all-time assists record holder.

They've already brought in defender Dante and as of this writing they're reportedly closing on in Schalke's Julian Draxler as well - which means that the Royal Blues may have a somewhat smaller pile of money that they'll spend on luring players away from putatively lesser clubs, who will then spend that money and so on and so forth.

That doesn't initially sound like a problem until you consider that the sums teams are going to have to fork out for players are exploding as well, driven by building Premier League wallets. A club like Tottenham Hotspur, which finished sixth in England's top division last season, are able to splash 30 million euros to lure Heung-Min Son away from Champions League participants Bayer Leverkusen. Even a club like Leicester City doesn't need to think twice about handing over eight million to Mainz for Shinji Okazaki.

To put things in perspective, under the Bundesliga's current TV deal, Bayern Munich will receive around 50 million euros - or a little over half of one of our new currency unit, the de Bruyne. The team that finishes last in the Premier League gets around 133 million or a little less than one-and-a half de Bruynes.

Bayern Munich are traditionally one of the richest clubs in the world. Former club potentate Uli Hoeness loved to brag that the team had 350 million euros (around four de Bruynes) stashed away in its savings account. Suddenly that doesn't sound like all that much.

As a team that ran in the black and had no need for Russian oligarchs or Arab oil sheikhs, Bayern looked set to be one of the big winners as the Financial Fair Play rules were phased in. The English windfall makes that scenario seem unlikely. Manchester City didn't need oil-money subsidies to pry de Bruyne away from Wolfsburg. So the new English TV deal means that the Citizens no longer have to worry about falling afoul of FFP regulations in the near future.

The Premier League's windfall represents the start of one of the quantum leaps that happen ever so often and send ripples throughout football - comparable to Giuseppe Savoldi becoming the first million pound player in 1969 or the Bosman ruling of 1995. The playing field may well become somewhat more level when the German Football League negotiates a new deal for the TV rights to the Bundesliga in the 2017-18 season.

But until then expect the sort of unusually frenetic Bundesliga transfer period we're witnessing right now, with players of various calibers transferring to and fro - for a whole lot of de Bruynes.

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