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Jordan Henderson
joined Liverpool on 9th June for £20 million after making
seventy-one domestic appearances for Sunderland. Four days later, Phil
Jones signed for Premier League champions Manchester United for around
£16.5 million after an impressive season for Blackburn Rovers.
Ashley
Young soon followed Jones to Old Trafford (£17 million) while Ricardo
Alvarez (to Arsenal for £12 million), Neymar
(to Real Madrid for €45 million) and Alexis
Sanchez (to just about every top club in the world for £45 million) are
just some of the other players who have been touted for transfers this summer.
All of these names have at least one thing in common: they have all prompted
football fans around the world to state, “he’s not worth that amount of money”.
So-called
‘big clubs’ have been paying inflated fees for many years. The problem is that,
once one team pays over-the-odds for a player, that becomes the benchmark. Cristiano
Ronaldo clearly isn’t ‘worth’ £80 million but, as Real Madrid were happy to
pay Manchester United this fee in 2009, other clubs took note; in football
economics, if Ronaldo left Manchester for that much then surely someone, for
example, who is half as good as he is should go for half the fee.
It
obviously doesn’t work like that, because it is all about supply and demand in
football (and the player’s contract has to be taken into consideration), but
when Arsenal see Andy
Carroll move to Liverpool for £35 million and Fernando
Torres goes to Chelsea for £50 million after a torrid half-season at
Anfield (and a poor World Cup before that by his admittedly high standards), it
is hardly surprising that the Gunners scoffed at Barcelona’s
£35 million valuation of their influential leader Cesc Fabregas.
The
Spaniard isn’t ‘worth’ that – no human being is worth that amount of money –
but this is the current state of the market. Fabregas is clearly a better
footballer than Carroll, Robinho and Dimitar Berbatov, and they’ve each been
bought for £30 million-plus in recent years, so common sense (or rather,
footballing sense) dictates that Fabregas should be sold for more than this. Kaka
went to Real Madrid for £56 million and I would imagine that Arsenal’s
valuation of Fabregas would be pretty close to that.
Transfer
fees have escalated because the big clubs are desperate to get their man but are
not overly bothered about losing very little money, relatively speaking.
In
the modern game we have the common issue of a player leaving a club at a young
age and, because a side doesn’t want to miss out on millions of pounds which
the player is predicted to be worth in the future, the buyer is forced to pay
tens of millions of pounds extra. Henderson, Jones and to a certain extent
Leeds United’s Robert
Snodgrass – valued at £8 million by manager Simon Grayson last week – are
all examples of this.
But
do the clubs care? Of course they don’t. Ronaldo has scored sixty-six goals in
sixty-three games at Madrid and the
club are still doing well financially despite the obscene fee paid two years
ago. They’re not going to care about the money if Ronaldo keeps producing the stunning
performances that he is doing for the Bernabéu
club.
Did
Los Blancos worry about the £47 million fee they paid to Juventus in
2001 for three-time FIFA World Player of the Year Zinedine
Zidane? What about Juve themselves when they bought their replacement for
Zizou, Pavel
Nedved, for £38 million? No, they were happy to pay it. No skin of their
collective noses. They can afford it; it’s fine.
Except
it’s not fine, because now, every time the transfer of a player is mentioned,
the fee is one of the main discussion points. Dimitar
Berbatov is rumoured to be leaving Manchester United for French side PSG for
£11 million; it is not unreasonable to argue that last season’s Premier
League top goalscorer is ‘worth’ more than this. But United are happy to accept
it (allegedly) so why even bother debating it?
If
football clubs are just going to treat transfer fees as digits on a screen,
then that’s how transfer fees should be viewed. They certainly shouldn’t be
used to rate a player or be mentioned every time a player hits a shot wide or
misses the ball altogether (this is particularly prominent in the case of
Fernando Torres); clubs don’t pay what a player is worth, they comply with the
supply and demand-orientated market. Transfer fees, at the highest level of the
game, have lost all meaning.
The
fees are only going to get higher and higher, inflate further and further and
so, with it, we should pay even less attention to them.
