Arsenal is a successful club. They don't spend much money on transfers, but they have found great success in buying value players from other countries. A vast majority of them are signed from clubs outside of England, and most have logged over 100 games with the club. Roy Hodgson seems to share this thinking, which is why I hope to see him retained beyond this season.
Here, we find the value we get from our transfer fees by dividing the total by the number of appearances for the club (players who signed for an undisclosed fee not included):
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Doesn't this seem wrong? We've paid more than twice as much for England-based players, but the foreign-based players have more than twice as many appearances! Of course, none of this takes wages into consideration, which is a, um, considerable consideration. It does, however, show us that it is possible to put together a winning club on a modest budget. I feel like I'm pointing out the obvious, but the number of struggling clubs with squads full of career England-based players is astounding.
So, if English players are overpriced, where is the best place to find new talent? Watch this space.
aha!
Aha. This is something I’ve long pondered, Colin. The conclusions I’ve come to are that on one level, a team like Fulham is best off shopping in the US and Australia. In these markets you get a degree of certainty and the adaptive process is easier, but you don’t pay the British player premium. I bet you’d find that US and Australian players have been remarkably good value all told. They’re the Swedes of the noughties, if you will.
The other thing to do is get to the source, which to me is probably West Africa (if you want quick and athletic footballers for the modern game). The problems with this is that a) there’s going to be a lot of risk here, and b), the French clubs are all over this one already (proximity, language advantages, etc). That being so you go a step further, let the French clubs do the nurturing, then go from there. The trouble is that the French clubs aren’t stupid, and charge a suitable premium for their rough diamonds. Didn’t Arsenal have to pay £5million for Bacary Sagna from Auxerre? It’s still very good value, but a harder sell for a club like Fulham whose fans seem to demand some ‘name recognition’ in their signings. Also, for all the good value Wenger finds, he probably has more leeway and perhaps isn’t afraid to miss with a signing. A Fulham manager needs to be a bit more safe with his transfers or he’ll be in trouble.
So where next? Work permit restrictions mean you can’t just send a bevy of scouts off to Columbia to dig up the next wave of young Valderramas. So maybe it has to be Europe, in which case you presumably have to be prepared to pay young players more than the other teams will. Which might end up being good value in the long-run anyway; look at all the baseball teams who baulk at paying first round signing bonuses, taking a lesser talent who won’t cost as much but won’t contribute as much either. The cost of signing an established Championship player is very high; why not spend a fraction of that (but more than is spent now) on securing the best young players for the academy?
Otherwise surely the answer has to be to mine EU countries that are, so far, under-represented. This is where Sheffield Utd are being clever, setting up links with (alright, buying) Ferencvaros in Hungary. This is seriously clever: Ferencvaros are the most famous club in one of the greatest football nations. If they can restore them to something like what they were the payoff in terms of local knowledge, access to local talent, etc, could be gigantic. I’m fairly convinced that this is the way forward, perhaps in Romania as and when they get EU status. There’s no easy answer, of course.
Rich
The 90 minute rule is an FA
The 90 minute rule is an FA rule which states that academy players must live within a 90 minute commute of their team.
This rule is designed to protect smaller clubs who constantly produce talent only to see them move to a bigger Premiership side with the club re-couping a fraction of the players potential value. Every team in the Premier League is guilty of abusing this rule but the top-4 are perhaps the most blatant abusers.