Ten weeks, no explanation
Jon Aspropotamitis was taken off at half time. His team was winning one nil.
He did not play again for ten weeks. The coach did not speak to him once in that time. Not a word. Not hello.
He was calling his agent asking whether he should come home.
Then one day the coach walked up to him and said he was playing the next game.
This is Episode 27 of The Overseas Athlete, and it is one of the more honest conversations I have recorded.
Jon came through the A-League with Western Sydney, Central Coast, Perth, Western United and Macarthur before Pohang Steelers signed him at the start of 2023. He found out later he was the sixth or seventh choice for the job. The players ahead of him either said no or could not get out of their clubs.
The contract came through within an hour of Macarthur accepting.
Then the hard part started.
He landed in a Korean winter three days after training in a singlet in an Aussie summer. Four hours in a maxi cab from Seoul to Pohang, looking out the window and wondering what he had done. His wife stayed in Sydney for work and visited every eight to ten weeks. Aussie humour landed to silence in the change room. Dinners with teammates using Google Translate.
He described walking into an empty apartment after a bad session with nobody there to say a word to.
Ten months later he was on his knees in Seoul having won the Korea Cup, with his parents and his wife on the pitch.
His advice to the version of himself who signed that first deal: every foreigner gets tested at the start. They want to see if you crack.
Full episode:
The bonus structure he had never seen
One part worth pulling out separately.
Jon had played ten years in the A-League without a single bonus in a contract. The salary cap makes them hard to regulate, so clubs pay a flat wage and that is it.
The Pohang contract had bonuses for winning the league, the cup, individual games, appearance milestones.
He found out what that meant in the changing room in Shanghai. They had drawn a knockout tie one all. He walked in expecting people to be angry about the result. They were angry about the bonus.
Win that game and a player could take home the equivalent of half a month's salary.
That is money that never touches the base salary. It goes straight home.
Which is where the currency question starts.
What the money did this week
Jon was paid in Korean Won. He talks in the episode about the strange feeling of a salary sitting in a foreign bank account, then working out how to get it back to Australia for a mortgage that was still running.
Every athlete earning abroad has a version of that. Two of them had a very good week.
The yen moved nearly 4% in a single week.
The Bank of Japan and the US Treasury bought yen in a coordinated intervention on Friday. That is rare. The yen went from above 163 to the dollar at the start of last week to 157 by Friday.
On a ¥200 million salary, that shift is roughly A$65,000 more when it converts home. Before the player has touched it.
The Bank of Japan held at 1% and warned inflation would run clearly above 2% into next year. One board member voted for a hike.
The euro also ran in the athlete's favour.
The Federal Reserve held at 3.50% to 3.75% on Wednesday. Three members pushed for a hike, the most unified hawkish dissent in nearly a decade. The dollar fell around 0.6% anyway, because the hold was the headline.
The euro climbed into the mid 1.14s. The Australian dollar fell after June inflation came in at 3.8%, below the 4.0% the market expected.
On a €3 million contract, a 1.5% move is €45,000.
For a player earning in Europe and converting home, the week ran in their favour. For a player on an Australian contract meeting costs abroad, it ran the other way.
Both directions
A forward contract locks the rate on a salary already agreed. A player earning yen can fix last week's level and hold it.
A limit order sits above the market on money not yet moved, ready if the currency extends.
One guards the floor. The other reaches for the high.
The intervention, you cannot control. The rate, you can.
Full articles on both moves are on the site.
Where I am
Back at the desk properly after moving countries, which took longer than I planned.
Three episodes recorded and coming over the next few weeks, and I am booking the next block now. More specialists this run. The people who sit across the table from athletes every week and get asked questions they cannot always answer.
If you are earning in a currency that is not the one your bills are in, that is a conversation worth having before the next payment lands rather than after.
Chris