Formula to rank worst Premier League summer signings takes some believing | OneFootball

What do you think have proved to be the worst Premier League summer signings?

How would you judge them?

How would you rank them?

Well, a new report from ESPN has taken on the task.

The formula they have used takes some believing…

‘What makes a bad transfer?

Almost by definition, the worst deals among these 203 moves for €10 million or more are going to be some of the most expensive ones. And if we look at “value left on the bench” — a player’s transfer fee, multiplied by the percentage of minutes he hasn’t played this far — then it’s going to skew heavily toward the biggest deals.

If a team paid €10 million to sign a player, then €10 million is the max that can be left on the bench. If a team paid €100 million, then, well, yeah, you see where I’m going. By this crude metric, here are the 10 worst deals among the Big Five leagues so far:

1) Alexander Isak, Liverpool: €107.88 million left on the bench 2) Yoane Wissa, Newcastle: €57.7 million 3) Nick Woltemade, Newcastle: €46.95 million 4) Xavi Simons, Tottenham: €43.2 million 5) Jamie Gittens, Chelsea: €41.83 million 6) Noni Madueke, Arsenal: €38.7 million 7) Tyler Dibling, Everton: €37.95 million 8) Omari Hutchinson, Nottingham Forest: €37.8 million 9) Florian Wirtz, Liverpool: €37.5 million 10) Jorrel Hato, Chelsea: €36.71 million

Quite incredible that ESPN have found a way to make Nick Woltemade the third worst of all the Premier League summer signings.

I would think he should be more towards having proved one of the top three…

I then thought about the way they ranked this, basically the minutes that players haven’t played for their new clubs.

I checked on Nick Woltemade and he has actually started all eight Premier League matches since arriving, playing 618 Premier League minutes out of the 720 maximum that would have been possible.

I then cottoned on, this ESPN report has included the three Premier League matches, 270 minutes, BEFORE he signed and became available to play!!! This is beyond laughable, so will they repeat this exercise after the January window and then penalise players signed in that window, including minutes they didn’t play for their new clubs in the first half of this season???

Not content with that, ESPN then used another formula to make a different list of worst Premier League summer signings (indeed, worst in all of Europe)…

However, we’re only grading these moves based on the downsides. Let’s say you sign someone for $80 million and he only plays 50% of the minutes every year … but he also gets you 12 goals and 5 assists every year. Is that a failure? A success? A combination of the two?

Transfermarkt also estimates the market value for every player in the world using crowd-sourcing. If we take that and multiply it by the percentage of minutes each player has played, we can come up with another crude number: a version of the value he’s provided to his team thus far. (It’s not perfect — estimated transfer values aren’t 1-to-1 with player performance — but it at least lets us apply the methodology to each player equally.)

Then, we can rank each deal by both of these numbers — value provided, value left on the bench — and then we can combine the two numbers to get a general sense of the performance of each transfer so far.

(***ED: If you can fully understand that formula then I am impressed!!!)

The 10 worst transfer deals so far

10. Ben Doak, €23.1 million, Liverpool to Bournemouth 9. Arnaud Kalimuendo, €30 million, Stade Rennais to Nottingham Forest 8. Fábio Silva, €22.5 million, Wolverhampton to Borussia Dortmund 7. Omari Hutchinson, €40 million, Ipswich Town to Nottingham Forest 6. Tyler Dibling, €40.5 million, Southampton to Everton 5. Dário Essugo, €22.7 million, Sporting Lisbon to Chelsea 4. Ardon Jashari, €36 million, Club Brugge to AC Milan 3. Charalampos Kostoulas, €30 million, Olympiacos to Brighton 2. Giovanni Leoni, €31 million, Parma to Liverpool 1. Yoane Wissa, €57.7 million, Brentford to Newcastle

While there are all kinds of caveats with these rankings, no such conditionals apply here. Purely based on the first three months of the season, this is easily the worst transfer of the summer. Wissa hasn’t played a single minute for Newcastle yet, but it’s worse than that. Everyone else in this top 10 is 23 or younger. In fact, everyone else in the top 25 is 24 or younger. These are all players with plenty of time to improve and come good, to make up for lost time.

Wissa, though, is already 29 years old.’

My conclusions

This feels even more bizarre, as not even any mention of the reality that Yoane Wissa picked up a serious injury on international duty that has prevented him playing so far. You would think it was a case of Wissa proving a total flop and not able to get a game due to how poor he has been.

Surely it should be ranked as unluckiest signing, not worst. Yoane Wissa had only missed three Premier League matches in the last three seasons due to injury, then he and Newcastle United get this incredible bad luck!