WHEN YOU SEE teenagers moving clubs for €50 million, you can’t help but feel that all footballers are overpriced.
Well, according to research by CIES Football Observatory at least, they are.
On average, across Europe’s top five leagues — England, Spain, Germany, France and Italy — clubs paid 23% more per player than they did for those with similar characteristics over the previous five years.
By using a player’s age, position, contract, international status, experience and level of competition to determine, CIES can estimate their transfer value.
With that in mind, they say that Manchester United’s new signing Anthony Martial had the biggest gap between his estimated transfer value and reported one.
The top 10 were:
At the other end of the scale, Raheem Sterling’s move to Manchester City from Liverpool was deemed to be the best value transfer of the summer with the Premier League leaders underpaying by some €32 million for the former Liverpool player.
The top ten were: