Maybe I’m Out of Touch? No, It’s the Transfer Fees That Are Wrong. | OneFootball

There comes a point in every football fan’s life when they must accept that the game has moved on without them.

Perhaps it is when a full-back starts playing in central midfield, a goalkeeper completes more passes than the number ten, or a manager describes a 0–0 draw as “a fascinating battle of rest defence and controlled verticality.”

For me, that point may have arrived this summer.

Four very good footballers. Four players any Premier League manager would happily have in his squad. Four players whose families should probably unplug their phones for the next six or seven months.

But £418 million?

I’m sorry, what on earth is happening to football?

This is not meant as an attack on the players. Rogers is excellent. Anderson has developed into a seriously impressive all action impressive midfielder. Tonali is an established Italian international who already dreams of a move back to Italy, and Fernandes is one of the most promising young midfielders around.

But there was a time when £100 million bought you a genuine global superstar. It was the sort of fee reserved for a player who could win a Champions League tie by himself, sell half a million shirts before breakfast and cause thousands of people to gather outside an airport tracking a private jet on FlightRadar. Yes, there are a lot of weird people in this world.

Now £100 million apparently gets you a midfielder who is “Premier League proven” and turns 23 on a favourable date for the accounting department, an asset that can be amortised favourably.

Rogers and Anderson are now among the most expensive footballers in history. Not merely among the most expensive English players, or the most expensive midfielders, or the most expensive players signed by clubs with light-blue away kits. They are in the top 5 most expensive transfers of all time.

And yet, would either man make your current top 20 players in the world? Nah, not even close.

Perhaps they will eventually. Both are talented enough to become outstanding players. But nobody is presently sitting down to compile a Balon d’Or shortlist and becoming distressed because they have only found room for one of Morgan Rogers and Elliot Anderson. In fact, they’re not even in the conversation.

Maybe This Is Just Football Now

That is the strange part. Clubs are no longer paying enormous fees solely for proven greatness. They are paying for the possibility of future greatness, plus Premier League experience, youth, resale value, homegrown status, contract length, versatility and whatever an analyst has discovered by looking at a chart labelled “progressive involvements under pressure.”

You are not buying the player. You are buying the player, his potential, his passport, his remaining contract, his statistical profile and the comforting belief that another club might be even more deranged four years from now. Hello Spurs.

Football inflation has created its own circular economy. One Premier League club receives £85 million, so everyone knows it has £85 million. The next selling club immediately raises its asking price by £30 million. That club then spends the money elsewhere, alerting another seller that fresh funds have entered the ecosystem. This sort of reminds me of when Spurs sold Bale and spent it all on slop like Paulinho, Roberto Soldado, Etienne Capoue, Erik Lamela and Vlad Chiriches.

Within three transfers, a promising midfielder who was worth £35 million in May is suddenly valued at £78 million plus bonuses, one of which presumably activates if he learns the club anthem.

There is also no value in the market because every club is looking for exactly the same thing: young, athletic, technically secure players who can operate in several positions, press aggressively and retain resale value.

Everyone has the same databases. Everyone sees the same numbers. Everyone wants the same 15 footballers. Brighton and Brentford are supposed to be the exceptions, clubs whose data-led recruitment allows them to look beyond the Premier League and find value before everyone else notices it.

Brighton’s access to Jamestown Analytics, and Brentford’s similarly analytical approach, gives them the confidence to take chances on players from less fashionable leagues, develop them and hope their value skyrockets.

The problem is that even this supposedly smarter corner of the market now looks completely mad. Brighton demanded around £100 million for Carlos Baleba last summer and could reportedly ask for something similar again, despite a poor season, because clubs are no longer paying for performance alone.

They are paying for potential, physical attributes and what the player might become in two or three years. This summer Brighton spent £21.5 million on Zadok Yohanna from AIK Stockholm, an 18-year-old (at the time) who had made only 13 Allsvenskan appearances.

Perhaps Jamestown has identified the next superstar and Brighton will eventually sell him for five times that amount. Perhaps they figured they could sell him for double it in a couple years to some other club even if he doesn’t perform.

Their record suggests they deserve some trust. But £21.5 million for a teenager with 13 Swedish top-flight games is not uncovering a cheap hidden gem. It is placing an extremely expensive bet on one. Even the clubs praised for finding value are now spending fortunes on the possibility of future value. The market is no longer pricing footballers. It is pricing the dream of the next £100 million sale.

The result of all of this is not scouting. It is an auction held in a burning building. Mateus Fernandes is the perfect example of this. How can a relegated side demand £85M for a player? Let alone get it. For context, newly promoted Hull City cost current owner Acun Ilicali a reported £20 million to £30 million when he bought the club from the Allam family in January 2022. They’re selling a player for 4 times the cost of a football club who are now in a division above them.

Power to the Point for Players to Excel

Perhaps this really is the new normal. Maybe £100 million no longer means what supporters think it means. Premier League revenues are enormous, squads are treated like investment portfolios, and transfer fees are spread across long contracts until £117 million begins to look less like a national infrastructure project and more like a manageable annual expense.

That may make sense inside a spreadsheet. It does not make it feel any less absurd.

Because supporters do not experience transfers through the eyes of an accountant where they get turned on by annual amortisation charges. They only see the headline number. There will be the odd weirdo on Twitter who’ll say, the transfer fee is only a fraction of it per annum due to it being spread out over the course of his contract, but then again Twitter is full of weirdos. Imagine going down to the pub with your mates and one of them starts chatting nonsense like that, bore off.

Football fans see £116 million for Elliot Anderson and naturally expect a combination of Andrés Iniesta, Steven Gerrard and Claude Makélélé. Look at Paul Pogba, the fee meant that he was expected to be everything, everyone and everywhere, and that wasn’t possible. Who will City eventually have to sign to unlock Elliot Anderson? I guess when you’re funded by the United Arab Emirates the fee won’t matter and will just add another charge onto the 115. Maybe that’s why they wanted the fee to be £116M, rather than the £130 which was widely reported before City denounced it.

Transfer fees create a standard no young player could reasonably be expected to meet. Anderson cannot simply be good. Rogers cannot have a quiet month. Fernandes cannot “need time to adapt.” At these prices, people expect immediate greatness, several trophies and possibly assistance with their mortgage. Transfer fees and wages automatically put a target on your back.

We live in a world now where people look at the headline stats; goals and assists. When Anderson doesn’t start every match, or goals 7 games without a goal or assist, there will be 007 memes, there will be scrutiny, and it isn’t a fair pressure for a young man to have burdened on him due to silly football executives.

Maybe the market has not lost its mind. Maybe it is behaving rationally within a completely irrational system. Maybe I’m trying to make sense of something that makes no sense. We live in a time where everything, and I mean everything has been gamified into one big dodgy betting market.

If Donald Trump can tell his buddies to make big bets on oil before he speaks publicly about war ending, then you know what, maybe accepting nothing makes sense anymore is easier.

Just like penalties (ironically which Donald Trump won’t face) I cannot pretend to understand it anymore. Nor do I want to try and understand it anymore.

Are these players world class?

No.

Four hundred and eighteen million pounds for four midfielders and attacking midfielders, none of whom could currently be called an undisputed world-class superstar. They may all prove terrific signings. They may dominate the Premier League for the next decade and make this article look ridiculous.

At these prices, though, terrific is no longer enough.

For £100 million, you are not supposed to buy somebody who might become world-class. You are supposed to buy world-class, have it gift-wrapped and receive a complimentary Champions League trophy with delivery.

Crazy Prices are Creating False Economies of Value

Then there is Manchester United, whose supporters are congratulating themselves for finding “value” in Youri Tielemans at £35 million. In this market, perhaps that fee does look reasonable, but the transfer fee is merely the entrance charge.

United have reportedly given a 29-year-old a five-year contract worth £200,000 a week, meaning the total commitment could reach at least £87 million before bonuses and signing fees. Tielemans is not an ordinary 29-year-old, either. The probability is that he’ll stay those 5 years with him being nothing more than a squad player waiting for that contract to expire come the end of it with no resale value.

Tielemans made his senior debut for Anderlecht at 16 and has already accumulated more than a decade of first-team football. Sports science has improved, of course, but players who start that young often carry far more mileage than their age suggests. Michael Owen, Wayne Rooney and Raheem Sterling all appeared to decline earlier than expected after becoming first-team regulars as teenagers.

James Milner is always offered as the counterargument, but Milner is the anomaly.

Even at Liverpool, his longevity came through professionalism, adaptation and accepting a reduced role, not by remaining at his physical peak forever. Tielemans may give United two or three excellent seasons, but committing elite wages until he is 34 and presenting it as a triumph of financial restraint requires a particularly creative definition of “value.”

No Its Football That’s Wrong.

Perhaps I’m out of touch. Perhaps football has simply entered a new financial age.

Or perhaps everyone involved has gone completely mad, and the only people willing to admit it are the supporters staring at the transfer ticker and wondering when £85 million became the price of potential.