Summer Transfer Thread 2018

[fez]

Can you explain why it's BS because just saying so doesn't make it so.

It never ceases to amaze me how some people don't believe inflation applies to football. Why were mid table sides throwing peanuts around? Because there was considerably less money in the game and considerably less money being circulated in transfer fees which meant fees were lower, so when somebody did spend £29m (for example) it was a lot more than today.

Of course inflation applies to football, I never said it didn't. I'm arguing that the level of inflation they claim isn't a fair representation of the change in the market. Inflation is not a simple sum of value vs outlay. United being worth 1bn today vs 100m 20 years ago doesn't mean that inflation was 1000%. It doesn't mean that transfer fees should rise by 1000%. This is the mean transfer spending so when you have a few clubs spending quite a bit of money and most spending very little then the mean is low even though the ceiling is high. Currently the average has increased a lot because that majority of low spending clubs is no longer spending small amounts. Consider this as a simplified example.

20 clubs do their transfer business
4 players are bought for £30m each by the big clubs
Another 20 are bought for £5m each by the rest

Thats an average cost of ~£9.2m per player even though most of them were nearly half that. The top end of the market is pushing the mean up a lot.

20 Years later and the figures are
4 players bought for £45m
Another 20 are bought for £25m

Thats an average cost of ~£28m

So we calculate the inflation and the average price has risen by ~305%. So the lower lower range of the market has massively increased in cost (500%) and the top end has only grown by 50%. Based on your acceptance of the given figures those £30m players from 20 years ago should be over £90m and yet they are only £45m. Thats why you can't take a set of massively disparate spenders and group them all together to decide on a single figure for inflation that covers the whole market.

The amount of wealth in the first world has exploded in the last 50 years. Do you think if we calculated the average net worth of everyone in China today vs 50 years ago that you would find a nice figure that represents both the wealth of the super rich and the super poor. Of course not.

Why was Ferdinand's fee just "quite a lot of money" and not "**** me that's ridiculous"? Again, is it just because you say so? For the record, it broke the british record transfer fee which to do that today would at the very least take upwards of £90m to do. Even if you simply took Ferdinand's fee as a proportion of Utd's revenue, the fee today would still be £90m+.

This isn't the only study either, there are other people, using different calculations and these all produce similar end results. Whichever way you want to look at it, Ferdinand wasn't just "quite a lot".

They produce headline grabbing figures that people love to read. No one wants to read a 3000 word piece going into depth on the different factors that effect the transfer market for different clubs through the years. People want a nice simple OMG figure.

No one was saying "football has gone mad" when United bought Ferdinand for £29m. People have been saying transfers have gone mad a lot over the past 5 years.

 

[BaZ87]

Of course inflation applies to football, I never said it didn't. I'm arguing that the level of inflation they claim isn't a fair representation of the change in the market.......

What is a fair representation then? As I said, there's various different ways to calculate inflation and they all end up producing the same results, give or take. The last Transfer Price Index calculations that I can find are from 2016 when Utd signed Pogba and based on their calculations (which are more complex than this one and linked to record transfer fees), Sheva was £95.9m, Rooney 2nd at £95.3m and Ferdinand 3rd at £94.9m. Again, link it to Utd's revenue from then to now - it's over £90m. Link it to the change in record transfer fees - a british record fee today is £90m+.

This is just 1 method of calculating inflation. Is it perfect? No and there will be the odd transfer or the odd season where figures are warped but they're not looking at tiny samples (unlike your random examples) and as I said above, ultimately it's producing the very similar results as other methods of calculating inflation so it can't be too wrong.

They produce headline grabbing figures that people love to read. No one wants to read a 3000 word piece going into depth on the different factors that effect the transfer market for different clubs through the years. People want a nice simple OMG figure.

No one was saying "football has gone mad" when United bought Ferdinand for £29m. People have been saying transfers have gone mad a lot over the past 5 years.

You are saying that nobody said "football has gone mad" but that's because we're looking back 16 years. I'll be lying if I said I could remember what was said or reported at the time but the figures do not lie. Whichever way you want adjust the fee for Ferdinand in 2002 to today (based on average increase, more complex formula's linked to record transfer fees, based purely on affordability to Utd and linked to their revenue or simply based on the british recrod transfer fee), Ferdinand's fee in today's money is still north of £90m.

Again, I don't know if people are more shocked by figures now compared to before but if they are a very simple explanation is that we've seen transfer fees rise quicker than before due to massive increases in TV money. That doesn't make historical fees any less expensive as they were when there was significantly less money in the game.