For years, ‘player power’ was a frequently used term within the football world, describing the ability of an individual player to force his club into letting him move regardless of a contract situation, or whether they wanted him to leave.

‘No one is bigger than the club’ came the cry – but that was very rarely true.

The Bosman ruling allowed players to move for free when their contract came to an end, meaning clubs potentially losing out first on millions of pounds, then tens of millions, and now perhaps hundreds of millions in transfer fees.

Players were given inflated wages to persuade them to stay, with clubs knowing that increasing a weekly wage - for example, from £50,000 to £80,000 - but not losing the transfer fee would save them money in the long-term.

It is not just in terms of transfers, either, that players wielded power. Leicester City players were accused of using player power to oust title-winning manager Claudio Ranieri – a claim frivolously denied by all involved, but one which surely must carry at least an ounce of truth.

Perhaps the driving force behind player power was agents engineering moves, often with their own motives behind it.

Of course, not all agents are bad, and many do a valuable job, but some would try to move players on summer after summer in the knowledge that they would be due a cut of the substantial money changing hands.

This summer, though, the tide turned. The well-documented, vast cash reserves that clubs in the Premier League have means that player power may well be a thing of the past.

Players like Virgil van Dijk, Philippe Coutinho and Alexis Sanchez have been forced to stay at their clubs against their wishes, when if they had kicked up such a fuss in the past, they would have likely been allowed to move on.

The clubs now hold the power because of a far stronger financial situation, meaning Van Dijk’s strike, Coutinho’s sulking and Sanchez’s flirting with a move away proved fruitless.

Southampton preferred to let van Dijk rot in the reserves for a while, before being reintegrated into the first team, mainly to prove a point to the player that they are in control and to top clubs that they cannot simply cherry-pick their players.

Liverpool, in turn, decided to squeeze another year out of Coutinho in their quest for trophies rather than bank a large portion of the Neymar money, knowing full well that other teams would not prove easy to deal with when trying to find a replacement.

Arsenal, too, essentially elected to lose Sanchez for nothing next summer rather than sell him in the last transfer window, as they try and make a return to the Champions League.

The momentum has swung fully the other way. Clubs can now afford to lose the vast sums of money, when before the risk would have been too much.

In Arsenal’s case, they can just write off whatever fee Sanchez could have pulled in, and would rather do so than lose their marquee player now.

The way it is going, they might lose money on Sanchez but secure another high-profile player in the same situation at another team as his contract runs out at the same time.

The astronomical amounts of money sloshing around within football are not always a good thing, and have threatened to spiral out of control. But they have secured one thing – no one is bigger than the club.

This summer has proven that clubs are the ones wielding all the power once again.

https://video.footballfancast.com/video-2015/PL25(96-97).mp4