A manager looking for buyers for players no longer in his plans, a manager reacting to being linked with a player from another club – these little matters could constitute a club failing to respect the contract signed with a player. But somehow it’s acceptable for clubs to threaten contract breaches in this manner. Only when a player wishes to breach that contract himself are clubs speaking their outrage.
There are many ways in which clubs attempt to exert pressure on their workers who might not want to stay with them any longer. They are banished to train alone or with youth teams as has been seen with Van Dijk. Players can be demoted or told to stay away altogether. Players can be fined, as is alleged by Costa in the case of Chelsea.

 But when a player takes the matter into his own hands and breaks the contract – even after the designated protection period of three years - the full force is brought upon them.
The sanctions are so high for players – and indeed for the clubs they end up at – that the likes of Coutinho or Van Dijk daren’t do anything drastic or else face huge punishments along with their hopeful destination clubs of Barcelona and Liverpool. But that – and not high wages or huge transfer fees – is the biggest betrayal of football as the worker’s game.

 Power is so heavily concentrated in the hands of the clubs that players have been left with no right to decide their own futures.
It is not necessarily the Coutinhos and the Van Dijks that come off the worst. More often it’s the player at a struggling club in one of Europe’s lesser leagues who has to put up with up to three months of late wages, low pay when it does come and conditions that are less than hospitable to work in. 

 Perhaps it will take one of those to open the floodgates and allow the exploited their fair share and free movement. Players want the same thing as the rest of us; freedom and security. 
The bigger players are just the tip of the iceberg and the ones in the headlines. - Goal