What I don't understand about soccer transfers is that you are essentially selling someone's remaining contract years, so none of the valuations make any sense without the context of how many years are remaining on their contracts. If a player is out of contract, a Bosman, their transfer value is zero. If a player has 5 years remaining on a contract, then you can amortize his transfer cost over the life of that contract. The implication being that players with lots of years remaining on their contracts are going to cost more to transfer, and those with fewer years left, are going to cost less to transfer. So, transfer valuations without knowing how many years are remaining on a player's contract seems like a pretty meaningless endeavor.
Happens all the time in Silicon Valley. 10 years ago, some VC pays $500M for a 5% share of some company, let's call it Facebook. The day of the transaction, the book value of that little company jumps to $10B. Is it really "worth" $10B? According to the Treasury Dept., and IRS, yes, yes it is. They are very transaction-oriented. Actions speak louder than words, and so real transactions mean more than valuations. Of course in hindsight a transaction like that for Facebook seem like no-brainers today, but back when it happened, people were saying it was crazy, since 6 months before, some VC invested money for a lot less. (I may have gotten the dates and percentages wrong, but you get my drift) Now, in a court, the heir of a schizo billionaire might argue that the transaction was not a real transaction since the billionaire was not in sound mind, being schizo, so in fact, he might be able to prove that the toenail clipping is not worth $10B.
The Dot Com bubble happened as well. And so did the real estate bubble and financial crisis. Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin exists, and really all shares of stock are of dubious "value". My point is that the TV money in English soccer (and the Chinese Super League to a lesser extent) is artificially inflating the "value" of players. Someone paid 110 million dollars for Pogba, which is fine. On the other hand, Dybala went to Juventus for less than 1/3rd the fee, but you're not going to convince me that Pogba's over 3 times "better", or more "worth it" than Dybala, just because someone overpaid for Pogba.
Sure, but in most (not all, of course) cases where folks talk about transfer value as meaningful it is because there is enough time on the contract, or the player is valuable enough, that a club won't wait out the clock.
I haven't run the numbers, but each place in the EPL is worth a set amount of money, plus a lot of less easy to compute value, If you think Pogba gets you into the CL, or keeps you from the drop, that's a pretty decent amount of dough. Again, might not come close to costs, I haven't looked, but there are revenue difference between leagues. But Football/Soccer/Sports is not a "normal" business and there is major warpage in many areas of its economics.
I believe you have it mixed up. When submitting a transfer fee you also agree to a new contract/terms/salary with the player you're buying. You're not buying the remaining years on a contract, you're buying the rights to a player under a new contract with your club. It's not like the NBA where you can trade players against their will and there's more value when there's more years left on the contract.
Well, the thing, I really dont understand is why players dont openly declare that they will not renew their contract in their last two years and openly declare that they will be open to the market in two years. The only one I know of who did that was Michael Ballack.
There's a sphere where what you pay becomes the worth: art. That's why many scams start with a work of art. You know it's worthless, but set out with a pal to transact it for a crazy price. Next thing you know, people are lining up to pay twice as much.
Lewandowski did the same thing. BVB decided to keep him anyway and have him play out his contract. I think most players keep quiet because in the end it raises their price. If a club knows a player won't renegotiate a contract they could probably get them for much less money. It would be a dick move to your club to do that, not to mention a huge distraction. Might even get you sent to the U21 side for a few weeks if management is pissed off enough about it. Hmmm. I am not sure this would work. Art doesn't get sold every few years. Art doesn't have to perform, just look nice. Art is a luxury not a need.Art doesn't depreciate in value, quite the opposite. Art to some eccentric billionaire good indeed be a toe nail clipping from Lady Gaga.
I've read that Roma is already looking at shaqiri to fill that spot, which would mean that.........Stoke City are coming back for pulisic!
You make a good point, and it helped me crystallize an analogy. Player transactions are a lot like buying advertising media. You compete with other advertisers to buy an audience, but that audience isn't worth the same thing to all advertisers. In fact, it's worth wildly different things depending on a myriad of unique considerations. One of the major ways it varies in value to me is the placement (i.e., medium and site/channel and time) relative to what I'm selling. And that sort of thing matters. If CP's Quality Used Cars wants to advertise to me, it's worth more to them to hit me up when I'm browsing autotrader than when I'm ordering Indian food from Seamless.
They will ask you if you're looking to pawn it or sell it. If you need cash fast but it's something you don't want back, you sell it at a severe discount for the benefit of getting the money right then.
They also do trades. I've gotten a couple nice guitar amplifiers and a nice desktop computer monitor at a great discount by trading equipment at pawn shops.
For those who are still pursuing player values, have a look at this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/...on=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region Sorry, but I was unable to copy any of the text from the article, but the sub-heading says the following:
If CP keeps improving, like we all expect, his next logical step is Bayern Munich. A league is well known, guarantee CL plays every year as well as domestic trophies. Many great players have played and are playing for BM. I give it 2-3 years and he'll be there.
I believe I addressed that in chapter 2 of "a guy who clearly been closer to flat broke than many on this board..." And then kids, we didn't have bank machines! Yeah, I know... And on Sunday, if your local bar wouldn't cash your check (or if, more likely, you didn't have money in your checking account) you dumped the sofa for change or just hung out in the bar until the barkeep took pity... Then there were these things called "answering services..." but I digress. I doubt CP goes from Dortmund to BM unless he has the season to end all seasons. More likely he goes to Engerland next. Will be very hard to resist the coin of the realm. Wish we had a few more starters in Germany. That'll be the league to watch again next season. Be nice if we had 3 or 4 more regulars so there's was a better chance of getting 2 players for your ninety minutes.
If he can consistently be the top 5 in the BL in goals/assists for 2-3 seasons, there's a very solid chance BM would pick him up. But I do agree, no one can offer the $$$ like the EPL teams.