1) Claiming that 97 out of 100 have passports is a bit off considering a good amount of them have UK passports so it doesn't apply to them. Unless you are going to whine about British players being overpriced again 2) Pretty certain that the UK doesn't apply the Cotonou agreement. Ndidi (Nigerian) had to get a work permit at Leicester. Kei Kamara was turned down for a UK work permit when he tried to move somewhere as well.
So is it correct to say that the TM values are incorrect for players playing in the Dutch league? And they are not good at predicting the ability of players not playing in the CL?
That situation was also a little different. He had 18 months on his contract. Most teams were willing to wait until summer then bid lower value to force Dortmund’s hand and get a bargain before he leaves on a free. Dortmund also didn’t want to lose him in January. Chelsea was walking into a transfer ban and knew they were losing Hazard. They needed a young replacement as they knew it would be transition year. They were ok with loaning him back and couldn’t wait like other teams. They were literally the only team interested with very little leverage. Each transfer has context to it beyond just player is x good and thus cost x amount.
Your interpretation of the data is bizarre and certainly doesnt "show" what you think it does. Do you understand the implications of KALM's analysis for the valuation of the Championship? What leagues are a passport an issue for other than the Championship?
In summary, it identified the top players but for 2 and you’d like to Re-arrange the order? that’s pretty accurate IMO.
Do you intentionally avoid retaining information just so you can ask me to write it again? Not gonna do it this time. I've already written extensively about various leagues and their restrictions. Go find the information yourself. Or, make it really easy on yourself and search through my recent posts.
I'm not "claiming" 97 out of 100 have passports. It's right there in the information. Yes, many have English or UK passports. Over half of the top 100 originate elsewhere (say, Jamaica, for example) but have an EU passport and therefore easy access to a work visa. If England doesn't apply the Cotonou agreement, then that probably explains exactly why there's ONE single player in the top 100 in the Championship from a Cotonou country with no EU passport.
i think you’re missing the overall point here The data you’ve shown is only one side of the information needed to draw a conclusion. You also need what percentage of the championship doesn’t hold an EU passport. I would guess that number is near or below the 3% you repeatedly mentioned. If that number is anywhere close to that, it completely invalidates your argument
He claimed three out of twenty don’t belong there. That’s 15% of the top twenty don’t belong there and then the order of the rest is incorrect . I would think that picking out the top players would be the easiest portion of the players to rank. The difficult part is later down the list. It’s also in a European league the competes regularly with other European teams in other leagues to make comparisons easier. I can’t see how this gets any better when you cross oceans and compare players of leagues that really have zero comparable data. I think the best way to try to compare players (USNT) would be to call in players from different leagues and let them compete in camps and friendlies.
Smart clubs donot choose/reject players based on TM values as an approximation of quality, especially those at lower table clubs. However as I posted before TM isnot about ability/quality, but about short term market values predictions. So their valuation of Gosens at Heracles was in line with what Heracles could ask, but way out of line with the abilities of Gosens. This obviously resulted in a higher price that Heracles could ask for Czyborra, while his valuation was about the same as Gosens at Heracles. TM isnot a scouting system.
85-90% of a single person's perspective is pretty good, I would guess that adding 30 other Eredivise fans would smooth out the numbers as perhaps they disagree with @feyenoordsoccerfan with the last three or have three others. i agree with the last statement and it truly depresses me when we see obvious favoritism towards a single league as both Arena and Berhalter have clearly shown. Since you appear to be an MLS fan, who are the players who are materially undervalued by TM (or the global soccer market)? When you look at MLS outbound sales over its history, do you see an obvious pattern of undervalue that should be exploited?
Nope, those two were the ones I immediately could define (as my opinion of course!!) that were wrong. There are a couple others I would replace too, but I have to give more thought about replacements. Karsdorp would be in that 20 too, so another has to go, to name one.
No single player will necessary have an accurate TM value. But league wide TMs should average out. However, why use TM values to compare leagues when you can just use actual salaries? The interesting thing out of all this, for me, is that the Championship has, through enormous increase in money, become possibly a Top 7 league in the world. The thing holding it back is that it has no Champions League places. So, it will never attract the top players, in their prime. But the same is true of MLS and all non-UEFA leagues. Most UEFA leagues, outside the top 5, tend to have all the best players on 1-2 teams that vie for the the UCL. If you compare the Championship teams to the majority of teams in the Dutch, Belgian, Russian leagues, they are probably paying higher wages and attracting better players. But, most of American soccer people still view the Championship as a slog fest of long balls and poor technical play. Which is why a rumor of a LB from Wigan going to a Serie A club as a backup is incredible.
Last year the Chicago Fire had the 3rd highest MLS payroll and missed the playoffs. The implication that money spent equals quality is easily dismissable trash. ManU with the wrong coach and wrong players can spend a lot of money and lose. Similarly, MLS reserves briefly used to go to USL for higher salaries as starters there. MLS players have for decades gone to the SPL and Scandinavia, even ones who are pretty mediocre. Each of these moves is arguably downward in a sporting sense but at times has been an upward financial move. Davies was not in Sweden for his health or the cool winters, and he had MLS interest. He was there because they would pay him more to do roughly the same thing as here. This is basic arbitrage that players exploit when opportunities arise. When MLS paid a reserve $10k that same player could start in USL for $30k, and would move. For a period USL got competitive in CCL. It was embarrassing and MLS raised reserve salaries. This is economics and something of a game. This is not some strictly monitored objective quality assessment. Also, MLS teams operate within caps and rules, set for reasons of parity and economics. UEFA only has financial fair play. I mean it's weird to bring up TAM and GAM and such but not get into where the whole game is basically set up to surpress salaries, except for a short list of players, and only on about half to 2/3 of the teams.
Another reason this is a trash argument. Ian Harkes at DC became a sub. Goes to Dundee, starts. His TM value is down. How many sh*ts do you think he cares, and do you think he sees his career and/or options now as worse? Sorry, I assume the TM algorithm probably purposefully bids up players in the very leagues whose quality you then claim it shows. How does a player lose value by making a move that makes him a starter? if the algorithm is pointed towards your league affiliation as a leading value factor. To then claim it shows they are actually worth more is chasing your own tail. If that's what TM does it would actually prove the contrary argument that theories of value and/or value are connected to status.
A player is a starter for Team A. Becomes a bench player then goes to Team B, which is a smaller, less valued club than Team A, and his TM value goes down. Makes sense to me. Not sure what your point is. Again, they will never be 100% right on any particular player. Who is arguing that it is?
30 more fans could smooths those #s either way. You didn’t comment on my statement about TM comparison being made across oceans with hardly any crossover as a possible issue. I am an Orlando City fan. Like everyone I have only so much time to watch soccer. I prioritize my soccer viewing as 1st OC, then Barca, Man City, and then clubs US players play on plus some MLS teams that might catch my fancy. I have never paid much attention to TM before. It only comes up when OC is trying to buy a player and other fans discuss the possible purchase. I see how agents and players manipulates their values by pitting purchasing clubs against each other even if it’s just rumored. I’ve never come across TM being used as a tool to asses a player before. I’m more in the camp of feyenoodsocerfan about TM. So I’m not going to pretend to know who is over or undervalued in MLS. That’s not even my argument. Im questioning TMs ability to predict a players value, and then even if they could, is it a goof tool to evaluate or compare players.
What y'all are missing is the valuations you want to make all bootstrap off of the league or the "smaller, less valued club." The player involved probably saves their career and makes themselves more intriguing a prospect, because they are starting and more productive. However you are saying that we should instead emphasize the non-performance aspects. Irony: as a barely playing sub in MLS he had one foot on a banana peel for his career, but we're going to say he's less valuable starting in a lower prestige league. I wouldn't be surprised if TM does it this way. My whole argument is a better MLS star player might be cheaper than a UEFA sub or prospect, based on where they are coming from. The Harkes example underlines that becoming a better or at least more productive player wouldn't increase your value, independent of club choice. Ergo the people pretending this is about talent = price are bonkers. A significant component is location location location. Talent then comes in on top and can drive it skywards. But players are not treated equally from the same starting point, until they are in the same league on the same team. You got too cute and basically proved my point for me, thanks.
I havent focused on your passport argument because it seems like nonsense and the biggest argument you have made is that 97% of the top 100 of the Champioship have a passport. Sure their are leagues that are more difficult to get into, but there are plenty of them with low enough thresholds. Sure a player might not be able to get a work permit for the EPL or be good enough to forma team to use up one of their three foreign spots in La Liga or Serie A, but the restriction are low or non existent in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scotland, Germany, etc. Pulisic would be in the EPL even without his passport. The only reason Long isnt there is because the NYRB wouldnt accept their offer. The only reason MLs hasnt transferred more players in recent years is MLS and not passports... they have always overvalued their players (which eliminates some of the options) and more recently began over paying them. Stop making idiotic theoretical arguments and name the players where passports are the issue. It didnt stop Steffen (twice), EPB, Adams, Sargent, Ledezma, Mendez, Gloster, Soto, etc.
Seriously? His value peaked after playing around 2,000 mins his rookie season. He declined a couple hundred thousand when he lost his starting spot the next year. Miraculously, it hasnt dropped, but it is unchanged for his play at Dundee as a 24 yo. How much higher do you think it should be for a soon to be 25 yo Dundee midfielder?
Clint Dempsey headed out is worth $3.42m. Clint Dempsey Fulham - Spurs is $8.55m. Clint Dempsey shortly after, struggling and undesired, is still $7.75m. Clint going to Fulham is already a NT star. That's $5m for swapping over to a midtable EPL side. He struggles in performance at Spurs. The deduction is $800k, we pay twice what we got on the way out, to get back a player at 30 so messed up by the way Europe ended that it takes him a year to get his crap back together. How much of that sounds like prestige markup and how much sounds like it matters how well he plays? The closer you are to the perceived center of the soccer universe, the higher the markup.
You need to stop listening to the snobs in your head. I will speak for myself but pretty sure I have seen others write this... TM value is an estimate for what players could be sold for in today's market. That estimated sale price is a proxy for talent with many caveats. There are some known issues where it doesnt do a good job not should it be able to, such as young fast improving talent that doesnt have a lot of experience. The other area is sales prices relative to talent vary by age. I dont believe, and have seen others say likewise, that I would use for granular analysis of individual players. I do believe the issues I listed above are consistent across league and looking aggregate values of teams or leagues are probably accurate to a reasonable margin of error. Perhaps there is a premium for certain top leagues that should be adjusted for to remove.
I’m guessing that 30 additional posters would smooth it towards being more in line with TM. Wrt your comment on MLS being an ocean away, they still participate in the global soccer market as buyers and an occasional seller so there are certainly data points to use. They also pay 700 players and one can use the equivalent salaries are benchmarks across the world. I asked you about who is undervalued in MLS because we should all realize that the leading club have scouts all over the world and have an ever increasing presence in America. They have every incentive to arbitrage any systematic value discrepancies they identify. It should tell us something when not a single poster here has been able to identify even a handful of players who are clearly undervalued. @feyenoordsoccerfan has identified a bunch of players he thinks are over and under valued. That makes sense to me as I’m sure that on balance a lot of them are over and undervalued but hopefully the balance is fairly even. If we’re relying on @feyenoordsoccerfan advice, he thinks we should judge leagues by how many of their players represent top national teams - given that MLS is a league where players go once their international careers end or are ended when they join (Beckham, Giovinco), that again put MLS in the Championship/B2 bucket.
You're missing my point. You play more and produce more. Your value stays flat because of where that happens. Ergo, location is a key value factor. Whether you can claim to be playing better or at least more impactfully may be besides the point. But the argument is that I should treat the value as talent. I think the logic on this is you only succeeded because of the change (read; "drop") but there are people like Romain Gall who shoved their way into NT consideration based on going someplace from a MLS bench and then getting taken seriously. Another example, Jozy's transfer value right before he starts with AZ -- the best forward performance a US player ever had -- is his lowest value ever, in terms of both TM's market value and transfer dollars. His value at the end: highest MV and transfer fee of his career. Your response will be he manifested what he could do and raised his value. Problem being, if this was a truly wise market, it would anticipate his true talent and productivity and not appear to be chasing its tail all over the place after the fact. You shouldn't dramatically roller coaster from lowball to highball. Such a market will inherently under-estimate MLS value based on the bias that "we don't know what you can do yet." if the market gave real time talent evaluation without bias against other leagues it would anticipate your career and value at a different level. it doesn't. It has built in skepticism about whether you can hack it. Ergo prestige and perceived level of league are built into your price.
Can you stop posting on TM values until you actually learn how to read the data. Dempsey's value steadily increased while at Fulham and hit its peak value after the 11/12 season where he had 17G and 7A. This coincided with his move to Tottenham where the fee was about half the value. The value steadily decline from there even though he put up respectable numbers. Note that he was 29 when he moves to Tottenham, so it should be expected that his transfer value would start declining if he didnt improve.