Investing in the future after landmark sale

For Naestved Boldklub, a club with one of the smallest budgets in Denmark’s second division, the NordicBetliga, transfer revenue from the sales of their young stars is crucial.

Getting noticed in the transfer market is very difficult, especially as one of the league’s smallest teams which has typically been limited to doing deals with clubs in their restricted local network.

They have also lacked reliable knowledge of which clubs are interested in their players, making it harder to spark a bidding war and drive greater interest in their homegrown players.

But being members of TransferRoom has provided them with direct access to decision makers at more than 650 clubs across the globe, with whom they can pitch their players to in an instant.

Naestved BK took advantage of being on TransferRoom with a landmark sale of striker  Mileta Rajovic, their top scorer before he left the club for Kalmar FF in Sweden.

Not only was it the club's biggest player sale in more than 20 years, but it was also their first transfer to a team outside of Denmark since then.

The fee was so significant that Dinesen says it will allow them to invest in their training facilities for the development of their current and future first-team stars.

"Our strategy is that we develop Mileta and the other young players we have, and when we get a transfer we will develop the club," Naestved's Sporting Director, Peter Dinesen, says in the video below.  "We will use some of the money for a bigger training pitch. 

"We have one but also for our academy, so they have even more training facilities. Even better."

The relationship started when they arranged a friendly through TransferRoom’s Friendly feature before Naestved were able to pitch Rajovic to numerous clubs across their key markets in Scandinavia through the platform.

“Football is an international world, so our network is almost everything,” Naestved Sporting Director Peter Dinesen says in the video below.

“We started with a friendly and then we had a deal where we loaned a player. Now we’ve sold one to Kalmar, so everything is about networking and trust.

“We have an indoor pitch, so we invited them down to Naestved to have a friendly. We won and Mileta had a good game.

“We had a good chat before and after the match, and then we kept talking outside TransferRoom. But that was where the connection was made.

“We also had interest in him from some other clubs. Then we used the Pitch feature on TransferRoom. We thought that Kalmar should also have the chance after our good networking.

“I think they were interested in him already but they didn't know he was ready to be sold. That was the tricky part, when the club knows, ‘OK, he is actually a player we can get now.’

“It [the Pitch feature] helped me select a club that I thought Mileta was suitable for. It also helps to get a quick response. No agent talk: you go directly to the decision makers in the other clubs. It makes it a bit more trustworthy.”

More transfers to come with league deal

All of the clubs in Denmark’s top two divisions are on the platform, thanks to a league-wide deal with TransferRoom, driving their domestic market while also opening up more opportunities overseas.

The deal has also led to Danish football’s rapid growth in the international transfer market, leading to Denmark establishing itself as Scandinavia’s top footballing nation ahead of Sweden.

“It's a way to pitch our players and to get noticed,” Dinesen adds. “I don't think it's a coincidence that we, for the first time, sell abroad, after we got this league deal.

“I'm sure it helped a lot with this transfer and in the future I think we will see even more. Our network is very domestic and local, so it helps a lot that we use this platform."