February 6 – The three biggest transfers in the winter window - Philippe Coutinho (€160m), Virgil van Dijk (€84m) and Diego Costa (€66m) – were all concluded at a higher value than the real worth of the players, according to analysis by the CIES Football Observatory. Liverpool overpaid by €21 million for van Dijk, but balanced that with Barca’s overpayment of €13 million for Coutinho. Chelsea managed to get an impressive €26 million more than CIES’s estimated real value for Costa.
CIES estimated values of players are based on their own algorithm. In the winter transfer window just closed the CIES notes a high correlation (75%) between values estimated via their algorithm and fees paid by clubs. “However, the majority of transfers were concluded for higher amounts than those estimated. This confirms the ongoing inflation trend in football players’ transfer market,” said the report authors.
Much has been written about the Premier League club’s bumper €500 million+ spend in the last transfer window, but CIES’s report focuses on a wider European picture that saw spending in the Big-5 European leagues top €1 billion for the first time.
“Transfer expenditure increased by 36% compared to the previous record figure measured in 2017. English Premier League investments accounted for 51% of transfer indemnities paid by big-5 league clubs as a whole,” finds the report.
“Since 2010, Premier League teams always had negative balance sheets for operations carried out during winter windows. The net balance in 2018 was -€113 M despite the expensive transfers of Philippe Coutinho and Diego Costa from England to Spain. These signings mainly explain the record deficit observed for Spanish Liga teams: -€188 million. The estimated balance sheets for the three other major European championships were positive: +€48 million for the Italian Serie A, +€33 million for the German Bundesliga and +€14 million for the French Ligue 1.”
See the full report at http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2017/213/en/
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