How Much is A Player Worth?
Wednesday, 21 January 09, 10:48 AM · Comments(3)
Since the day the the key player was transferred from The Sailors to The Colliers before the Annual Uppies & Downies game in the 18th Century for a goat and a bag of coal (*) there has been discussion around the true worth of a player. From the first £10,000 player to the first £1M player and beyond the world has debated whether such fees are right/moral/justified or even necessary. So as the TW slowly trudges towards the end of the month I think it's worth raising the question for two simple reasons...
Craig Bellamy & Wilson Palacios are apparently worth £14M each and even allowing for the strange money world that both Man City and Spurs inhabit there seems little financial sense in either. In fact based on these fees Zenit's apparent desire for £20M for that man Arshavin is almost a bargain (maybe!). We all know that the value of a player depends on a few things, only one of which is the player's actual ability. In Man City's case (as before with Chelsea) the value rises because the selling club is keen to get as much cash as they can and with Spurs it seems to be that Daniel Levy is happy to pick a fee randomly out of the air! Add in the need for clubs to start bidding wars and agents trying to get a bigger 10% of a fee and we can see the whole transfer fee valuation is little more than guesswork half the time.
What makes it rather strange is that following Bosman, we had Kolpak and now the rather dark spectre of the Webster Ruling which could, as Arsene Wenger said, make the whole transfer system obsolete in the rather near future. It's okay for a team with a bottomless pit of money to make gambles of the future values of their assets but, using proper economics, teams like us cannot and should not go down that road. It doesn't matter whether we need players (we do) but also that the price being asked is a realistic and economic figure. If not we have to say no even at the expense of potential failure in the short term.
* - Agent fees were not included
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BaselGooner
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3 Comments · Add yours
Is Arshavin threatening to do a Webster to Zenit I wonder ?
There have been rumours of this but do you really want a player that arrives by that route - he's just as likely to do it to you. Let's be fair there were rumours that Hleb was going to do it too...
Well i hope Arsenal doesnt have to pay the price for haggling for a few millions...
I mean if we lose a match from now till the end of the transfer window for lack of creativity from the centre of the midfield...I'm sure Arsene wenger will realize the value of the few millions they were haggling for..