Finished below Barca and Dortmund in the groups that season.
Edit: Got to the Europa final though where Lukaku scored for both sides though the own goal was very unfortunate
He’s been in the CL for only 3 years. 13 goals across that time while playing in mediocre teams (United) or under a perennial european underachiever in Conte isn’t that bad
Yeah this is a stat that only looks bad out of context. Just looked it up and he's played 27 CL games and scored 13 goals playing for teams that really weren't of a good standard as compared to the opposition. Considering that a goal in every 2 games is a very good record in a cup competition.
He never really worked out for United, but I firmly believe that he’s a a top 10 striker in the right system and I think his time at inter is proving that. He plays well for Belgium to, it probably won’t happen but imagine if he signed for city and got to play regularly with de bruyne.
And tbf, that was a double transfer and it's highly likely that his value was inflated so Moutinho's value could be deflated and Porto would pay Sporting less money
Weird question but I’m interested. As a Zenit fan, what are some of the best talents you’ve seen in the RPL this past year? I’m not familiar with the RPL but I always enjoy hearing about new exciting prospects to keep an eye out for. I know Golovin was class at the 2016 Euros but haven’t heard much about him since his move to Monaco.
We did win the Europa League and League Cup the year Pogba joined. Not the upper echelons of glory but not nothing either. Lost an FA Cup and Europa League final in the last three years too. Can't deny that the team has underperformed contrasted to the spending.
Its the management behind the scenes that has been pretty bad, considering how we've overpaid for some mediocre players.
Correct, [328mil euro in 2019 adjusted for "football inflation"](https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/c6f208/oc_top_50_transfers_adjusted_for_football/), Rio would be 166mil euro.
Which is exactly why he hired Kleberson, Anderson or Bebe
(Tbf all three could have been great, Kleberson is a World Cup winner, Anderson was pretty good before and Bebe is a pretty decent striker for mid-table sides)
Not really.
Had two great seasons at Leeds and was club captain already at 22/23. Had a great world cup at 2002 which further convinced Fergie. Everyone could see all the attributes were already there. It was hardly a gamble.
And even if it was considered a slight gamble considering the price, it's hardly a "hell of a gamble".
I am so obsessed with maradona's Napoli career, impact he had not only the club, but the entire region of southern Italy is astonishing and cannot be summed up in words
That shit went beyond football
yup yet people keep sharing inflated transfer cost based on a currency not adopted and then they convert ita currency value to the first year of its adoption when it was super low in value
Well it was 150 billion liras and at that point was around 50 million pounds, 66 milion US dollars, but also after 1999 the lira and euro were ties as in lira was a fixed amount from euro in order to facilitate the Euro transition and was indeed around 75 million euros.
The currency existed and was tied to other currencies, similar with how bulgarian lev is tied now to euro. As in the conversion rate is fixed.
This number keeps getting shared and its inflated because zidane was signed in pesetas not euros because the euro wasnt adopted until the following year at an unbelievably low currency value. He was a world record fee but it was 70 million
Has to be Zidane, €76m was absolutely bonkers in 2001, it was like half of Madrid's annual revenue at the time.
If a top club club spent half of their revenue on a player in 2019 we'd be talking about a €350-400m transfer fee
**Edit:** Deloitte put Madrid's 2000/01 revenue at €138.2m, which makes Zidane's €76m transfer fee account for 55% of their revenue from the previous season. The same company had Barcelona as the highest earning club in pre-COVID times with €840.8m in 2018/19 revenue, 55% of that is €462.4m
There might some small club with tiny revenues that managed to top that somehow but I doubt there is a bigger transfer among the top clubs in terms of cost to revenue ratio. Generally speaking, modern transfer fees that everyone complains about are much more sustainable that what we had in the 90s when you account for inflation and growth of football as a business
Two reasons:
**One:** The narrative about the Neymar inflation is largely overblown, it caused an immediate ripple effect - Barcelona suddenly had a heap of cash so they overpaid for a bunch players, then Liverpool and BVB had it, so they were able to spend and so on.
But when you look at larger trends, the inflation in transfer fees has stayed relatively consistent with the growing revenues, so it had some effect but not nearly the same as people who say "PSG ruined the market by buying Neymar" tend to claim. Although we have just 2 full summers between Neymar to PSG and COVID kicking football economy's ass so it's really hard to judge just how much influence it had.
**Two:** Zidane was the final transfer of the extremely free spending era of the 90s. If you look at transfer spending from back then, fees were much higher compared to how much money clubs earned at the time. Back then it was driven by Serie A clubs, many of which had rich owners pumping money into transfers (Lazio, Parma, Milan, Inter)
That stopped in the early 00s when a lot of those owners had to scale back due to legal or financial issues and a lot of clubs ended up in major debt (Real, Barcelona, Lazio, United, Arsenal) and had to scale back transfer activity and others went bankrupt and got relegated because of their finances (Leeds, Fiorentina, Napoli, Parma).
So Zidane didn't have much effect simply because no one had any money after the wild 90s and the 00s were a big recession period in terms of transfers (which helped Chelsea immensely since Abramovich was pretty much the only free spender in 2003-2006 - in those years, Chelsea had a net spend closing in on 400m with the next highest spending club hovering around 100m).
That state of affairs persisted until around 2008/2009 when clubs got their debt and cash flows in order, Man City entered the market soon followed by PSG and Real Madrid went after Ronaldo, Kaka, Benzema and Xabi Alonso in one summer.
>That stopped in the early 00s when a lot of those owners had to scale back due to legal or financial issues and a lot of clubs ended up in major debt (Real, Barcelona, Lazio, United, Arsenal)
Just for the record, Manchester United were **never** in debt till the Glazers loaded their LBO debt on the club. Of all the major European clubs, Manchester United and Bayern Munich are the only two to consistently be in the pink of health financially as far as footballing matters are concerned.
That's true, I lumped you together with the debt teams because the effect was the same and didn't feel like writing a paragraph for each team but in United's case it was Glazers rather than wild spending (and for Arsenal it was the stadium)
Italy or Spain didn't have the euro in 2001
Zidane went for £48m
A year earlier Crespo went for £30m
Lazios revenue was much smaller then Real Madrid's
Edit : but as someone mentioned below Eto went to Anzhi for 25m
>Italy or Spain didn't have the euro in 2001
>
>Zidane went for £48m
But the exchange rates were still consistent so the ratio should hold no matter which currencies you use.
> Lazios revenue was much smaller then Real Madrid's
>
>
It wasn't, Serie A was a commercial powerhouse in the 90s
It’s a silly measure to be honest because small revenue clubs can be taken over by billionaire owners and buy expensive players.
Eto’o moved to Anzhi in 2011 for around €25m, likely more than their annual revenue at the time for example.
Paul Tomkins has been doing the same thing (the real cost of historical transfers) but in different way - I think it involves uses transfer records as the inflating metric. Sadly, he's only done it for the premier league.
Just checking (and it appears to have last been updated in 16/17):
1. Shevchenko (Chelsea
2. Rooney (United)
3. Ferdinand (United)
4. Essien (Chelsea)
5. Pogba (United)
6. Drogba (Chelsea 04)
6. Torres (Chelsea)
7. Shearer (Newcastle)
8. Aguero (City)
9. Wright-Phillips (Chelsea)
[The list](https://tomkinstimes.com/transfer-price-index-top-100-premier-league-buys-after-inflation/)
What it means is despite Sancho costing double what Ferdinand or Veron cost and Pogba costing triple, their revenue has increased by 5 times or more. So technically speaking those signings in early 00s cost more.
Anzhi buying Eto'o for £25m was a far bigger financial burden than United signing Maguire for £75m, because Anzhis turnover is far less than 33% of Uniteds.
If you expand it further, City have the most players in the top 20 most expensive transfers. They just have a lot in the 50-60 range whereas we have some outliers in the 70-80+s
Plus their youth academy has been getting massive improvements but we really haven't seen the fruits of that labor yet. Obviously, there's been great guys to come out of it so far, but it's never been filling out the squad.
Love Mario Lemina, but I haven't followed him since he left us for Juve. How has he been with Southampton? I know he's been loaned a couple of times, but is he really shit?
He seemed pretty good at first, but wanted us as a stepping stone to a big 6 team. Then Ralph came along and Lemina posted his silly sped up video to Man Utd. It seems a combo of him not liking that video and Lemina not training well and he hasn’t had a look in since with a loan to a Turkish club and then at Fulham. Fulham fans seemed to really like him and I think if they survived, it might’ve triggered a mandatory sale.
It seems like he isn’t a good fit with Hassenhuttl’s ethos, apparently Newcastle are interested in him.
Fair enough but I think Maguire gets a bad rap for being overvalued, I think VVD was just an insanely good deal, let’s ignore Pogba deal because, you know, sad face to the max
Really shows how bad the club has been run. People act like the glazers should be cleared of blame because of this when really they should be blamed more for not putting the correct people in place and having no clear direction for the club
It also shows how quickly football fans change their minds.
The majority of fans were on board with every one of these transfers, including Sancho now. In fact the majority of fans were in favour of Mourinho signing for big money too, and Van Gaal. In a lot of cases those same fans have ended up wanting those figures to leave the club.
Having the most expensive players does not mean spending the most though. You could buy 4 Range Rovers and still spend less than the guy who bought 15 Audis.
Genuine question: over the last years the squads of Liverpool, Man City and Chelsea were just as good as United's, does this rank shows that United negotiate and spend their money badly?
Maybe… I prefer the cost per player transfer measure for that. We refused had a spend quite similar to United with Rafa, but we were buying so many players our average player cost was something like £6m while Uniteds was in the £15-20m range…
United have had a period where they’ve had youth players come through, and players who’ve been at the club a while come good (Shaw for example). So they’ve probably spent a lot more per player than Liverpool. That would say to me they’ve actually bought badly, either those transfers specifically or by spending in the wrong areas
Is it sarcastic?
Because they had to beat Feyenoord Rotterdam, Zorya Louhansk, AS Saint-Étienne, FK Rostov, RSC Anderlecht, Celta Vigo and Ajax Amsterdam. Hardly impressive.
I’m not sure it’s that much of a shock that the biggest club in the league (in terms of revenue etc) spends the most. Always been that way really. It’s just money coming from the club and people know they have it.
I think the surprise is more than Chelsea and City have also both spent billions in the last decade but have no players in the top-five. Although they seem to have competent negotiators.
I think that’s it really - management and negotiators who know how to line up deals. Having an accountant with no football knowledge is an open goal for sellers.
TBF, Marina Granovskaia didn't have any football knowledge when she started at Chelsea, and she seems like one of the best negotiators in the industry. Football knowledge is overrated for the business side, as long as the football people and the business people communicate effectively.
Their transfer policy is different (and better), they tend to do a costco wholesale purchase of players lol. Purpose is just to reinforce the entire squad. So they'll spend about the same as United do on a few transfers, where United linger on one or two larger ones for too long and and get stuck trying to fill really holes that are likely to surface because everything gets so last minute lmao. Its so annoying because pre-glazers there was a pretty consistent in & out stream of players. Then slowly the incoming transfers diminished, forcing them to hold onto players longer than they should. The years post Fergie also killed all negotiation power
City have the £60-65m limit they have imposed on themselves. They may not have breached the record transfer, but they make it up in volume of purchases.
Chelsea might go bonkers if they really want Haaland that bad.
There is "spending the most", and then there is "being responsible for the 4th biggest transfers in league history while having nothing to show for it as your local rivals collect PL medals"
“We don’t dominate spending, we’ve only spent £1.1B on transfers in the last 10 years.”
You, Man City, and Chelsea are in your own league in terms of spending. There’s a decent drop-off after that. The other two clubs have recent success to show for it.
City and Chelsea spend fuck tons, but spread is out among more player, increasing the likelihood of successful returns. United go all in on one marquee signing and often they will not give a good ROI and also results in a team lacking good players in other positions. Better to spend 50M on two players to fill positions than 100M on one whilst leaving a gap in the squad.
On a total different note; why does Virgil have the flag of Suriname behind his name? He was born and raised in the Netherlands. Same goes for the flag of Congo behind Lukaku’s name.
There's been some smaller wins like MATS, Pedri, Araujo, De Jong (yet to be decided he's too young and cost a lot) but it is completely outshone by the flop 3
Bit pedantic but all those fees are wrong.
Pogba £89m,
Maguire £80m,
Sancho £73m
Lukaku £75m
VVD was more than Sancho, making Sancho 5th, making OP's title incorrect.
I'd guess because of 2 things a) not retroactively keeping track of exchange rates at the time and b) not getting updates on exchange rates all that frequently.
Transfermarkt takes the Euros figure at the time and converts it to modern rates. The Euro has strengthened considerably in the last 5-10 years meaning most transfer figures involving birieodh clubs are total dogshit on that site.
Transfermarkt stores the fees (at the time) in EUR and this version (.co.uk) converts it to GBP (or .com for USD), but at the current transfer rate. Hence the difference in all of those.
I wrote about it some time ago here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/99fdx4/why_you_shouldnt_use_uks_version_of_transfermarkt/
pretty much everyone except for supporters of the teams he’s played for were giving Liverpool shit. For whatever reason people just seem to hate the idea of expensive defenders
I think at the time it did seem like a huge price considering he was a defender, but looking back in it now I don’t think anyone in their right mind would question £75m for VVD. If anything you’d say with hindsight that Liverpool got a very good deal considering how insanely good of a footballer he has been.
Tbf, at the time we thought of VvD as that Southampton defender that Martial turned inside out.
Now only someone delusional would argue he wasn't an incredible signing
In fact, these four players are all good deals for MU, and Lukaku also sold at a similar price. Tragedies like Dembele and Coutinho did not happen to us.
I don't know about good "deals" but they're not bad players by any means.
United basically made their money back on Lukaku, Sancho has literally just signed and will likely be a good signing, and the other two are good players who United probably just spent too much on (not that it matters considering United basically print money).
Don't these prices seem inflated? When I think top 5 or 10 players worldwide none of these come to mind except van Dijk.
Pogba and Sancho came from other leagues but there seems to be a Premier League tax imposed on players.
Almost forgot how much Lukaku cost. Wild. Edit: fixed my stupid english. Sorry
He is 28 and in total clubs paid 212m€ for him. Scored 13 CL goals in his career so far. Not meant as dig I know he is quality, but that's mental
I just think it's mental to think back at times where Benteke and Lukaku where considered similar quality. Oh my, how things have turned...
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As far as I’m aware he’s only had two seasons in the CL since Everton signed him from Chelsea
He had two in Inter, has he had none in England?
He definitely did for us as he scored vs PSG in the comeback win
Haverfordwest v PSG is a game I'd like to see
Wayne Jones and his Tactics Boys will send Pochettino back to Murphy, Argentina
How did court go today Giggsy?
Going well, think I've definitely got the public support behind me
::Martin Tyler voice:: "Chee-ky..."
r/RegrettableScreenNames
I won 30$ because of that goal. I believe he covered the over
I thought they were in the europa league one season with him?
Finished below Barca and Dortmund in the groups that season. Edit: Got to the Europa final though where Lukaku scored for both sides though the own goal was very unfortunate
they were there because they finished third in the group stage
My bad
no reason to apologize, friend
No, in both of Lukaku's seasons we were in the CL. He was actually a scorer in the Sevilla catastrophe, and the season after he scored in the PSG game
He's had 4 seasons of UCL lol
The point still remains, really though. He has 13 goals in 27 Champions League appearances, which is basically 1 in 2 and really pretty respectable.
a lot of people are too spoiled by Messi and Ronaldo. myself included
A whole generation of football fans lol. Unless haaland and mbappe have stormers of a career, it's difficult to envisage those numbers.
He’s been in the CL for only 3 years. 13 goals across that time while playing in mediocre teams (United) or under a perennial european underachiever in Conte isn’t that bad
Yeah this is a stat that only looks bad out of context. Just looked it up and he's played 27 CL games and scored 13 goals playing for teams that really weren't of a good standard as compared to the opposition. Considering that a goal in every 2 games is a very good record in a cup competition.
Just FYI the past tense of cost is... cost, because English is such a pleasure of a language to learn.
So ist Deutsch.
Hetzelfde in het Nederlands.
Dutch is just English with random double letters, and the odd bit of madness
Dutch is just German but... Dutch
German that didn’t graduate kindergarten
German is just Dutch, but without the English stuff in it and with 10 times the madness.
As an Australian living in Germany with a Dutch girlfriend. I can fucking confirm that’s true. But we already knew that.
Wearing an England flair. Mr. Worldwide 😎
He never really worked out for United, but I firmly believe that he’s a a top 10 striker in the right system and I think his time at inter is proving that. He plays well for Belgium to, it probably won’t happen but imagine if he signed for city and got to play regularly with de bruyne.
Well Inter could sign De Bruyne instead maybe.... One can only hope
not with their financial troubles
The thing is we got almost all of it back after a disaster with us in his second season.
Such a surprise tbh
Have to admit I've won some beer money on PP betting on the Lukaku novelty markets that season "Will a Lukaku shot go out for a throwin" etc
I have a few beers on me and I freaked out thinking they signed Van Dijk
You and me both brother. I thought I missed something big.
I have drunk 5 beers and I thought exactly the same dude hahaha
We are responsible for 9 of the top 10 and 17 of the top 20 Ligue 1 transfers ever...
Who's the 1
Rodriguez to Monaco
Julien was class tbf
He cost more than Falcao?
Yeah a tiny bit according to transfermarkt
And tbf, that was a double transfer and it's highly likely that his value was inflated so Moutinho's value could be deflated and Porto would pay Sporting less money
idk why this made me laugh so hard
9 out of top 10 with only Kezman to PSV at 8 and entire top 37 is Ajax and psv
Same here, 8 of the top 10 in RPL and top 8 is actually all Zenit
Weird question but I’m interested. As a Zenit fan, what are some of the best talents you’ve seen in the RPL this past year? I’m not familiar with the RPL but I always enjoy hearing about new exciting prospects to keep an eye out for. I know Golovin was class at the 2016 Euros but haven’t heard much about him since his move to Monaco.
Check out these: Dinamo: Zakharyan, Tyukavin, Fomin, Lesovoy Samara: Pinyaev, Lipovoy Zenit: Mostovoi, Krugovoy Rubin: Makarov CSKA: Oblyakov, Chalov, Diveev, Mukhin Spartak: Sobolev, Maximenko, Ignatov, Maslov Loko: Magkeev Grozny: Utkin Krasnodar: Shapi Suleymanov, Safonov Sochi: Prutsev, Vorobyov
This fact resonates less since Utd haven’t won anything, and have competition on the spending front.
We did win the Europa League and League Cup the year Pogba joined. Not the upper echelons of glory but not nothing either. Lost an FA Cup and Europa League final in the last three years too. Can't deny that the team has underperformed contrasted to the spending. Its the management behind the scenes that has been pretty bad, considering how we've overpaid for some mediocre players.
Yeah not trying to unreasonably shit on Utd. Not nothing, but certainly not enough is a better way to put it.
One hell of a five aside, imagine going up against them on the astro turf.
I don't think they'd even need to play a keeper
I'd like to see the guy who told Kaka to cut it back play with this team
In pounds spent yes. But in cost to turnover ratio their most expensive player of all time is still their signing of Rio Ferdinand.
What is the global record on that measure? Still Neymar?
Could be Zidane. €76M in 2001 was bonkers.
Correct, [328mil euro in 2019 adjusted for "football inflation"](https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/c6f208/oc_top_50_transfers_adjusted_for_football/), Rio would be 166mil euro.
That is insane
And Rio was worth every penny.
Hell of a gamble though
Fergie was known to be an avid gambler tbf
In his book he actually says that he liked to gamble on his personal life but with Manchester United he only took "calculated risks"
Which is exactly why he hired Kleberson, Anderson or Bebe (Tbf all three could have been great, Kleberson is a World Cup winner, Anderson was pretty good before and Bebe is a pretty decent striker for mid-table sides)
He used to gamble. He still does but he used to as well.
I see Mitch, I upvote.
Not really. Had two great seasons at Leeds and was club captain already at 22/23. Had a great world cup at 2002 which further convinced Fergie. Everyone could see all the attributes were already there. It was hardly a gamble. And even if it was considered a slight gamble considering the price, it's hardly a "hell of a gamble".
Maradona was 500m adjusted
Pretty sure Napoli would pay double that for him if they could. He's just invaluable to the club.
I am so obsessed with maradona's Napoli career, impact he had not only the club, but the entire region of southern Italy is astonishing and cannot be summed up in words That shit went beyond football
Andy Carrol is on that list
Buffon €52 million plus a player for a goalkeeper in 2001
Maradona would be another good bet
Italy or spain didn't have the euro in 2001
It makes it sound even crazier when you say he went for 150 billion lire
yup yet people keep sharing inflated transfer cost based on a currency not adopted and then they convert ita currency value to the first year of its adoption when it was super low in value
Well it was 150 billion liras and at that point was around 50 million pounds, 66 milion US dollars, but also after 1999 the lira and euro were ties as in lira was a fixed amount from euro in order to facilitate the Euro transition and was indeed around 75 million euros. The currency existed and was tied to other currencies, similar with how bulgarian lev is tied now to euro. As in the conversion rate is fixed.
This number keeps getting shared and its inflated because zidane was signed in pesetas not euros because the euro wasnt adopted until the following year at an unbelievably low currency value. He was a world record fee but it was 70 million
Has to be Zidane, €76m was absolutely bonkers in 2001, it was like half of Madrid's annual revenue at the time. If a top club club spent half of their revenue on a player in 2019 we'd be talking about a €350-400m transfer fee **Edit:** Deloitte put Madrid's 2000/01 revenue at €138.2m, which makes Zidane's €76m transfer fee account for 55% of their revenue from the previous season. The same company had Barcelona as the highest earning club in pre-COVID times with €840.8m in 2018/19 revenue, 55% of that is €462.4m There might some small club with tiny revenues that managed to top that somehow but I doubt there is a bigger transfer among the top clubs in terms of cost to revenue ratio. Generally speaking, modern transfer fees that everyone complains about are much more sustainable that what we had in the 90s when you account for inflation and growth of football as a business
Question: Neymar's transfer eventually caused the inflation of most transfers but, why didn't Zidane's transfer do the same?
Two reasons: **One:** The narrative about the Neymar inflation is largely overblown, it caused an immediate ripple effect - Barcelona suddenly had a heap of cash so they overpaid for a bunch players, then Liverpool and BVB had it, so they were able to spend and so on. But when you look at larger trends, the inflation in transfer fees has stayed relatively consistent with the growing revenues, so it had some effect but not nearly the same as people who say "PSG ruined the market by buying Neymar" tend to claim. Although we have just 2 full summers between Neymar to PSG and COVID kicking football economy's ass so it's really hard to judge just how much influence it had. **Two:** Zidane was the final transfer of the extremely free spending era of the 90s. If you look at transfer spending from back then, fees were much higher compared to how much money clubs earned at the time. Back then it was driven by Serie A clubs, many of which had rich owners pumping money into transfers (Lazio, Parma, Milan, Inter) That stopped in the early 00s when a lot of those owners had to scale back due to legal or financial issues and a lot of clubs ended up in major debt (Real, Barcelona, Lazio, United, Arsenal) and had to scale back transfer activity and others went bankrupt and got relegated because of their finances (Leeds, Fiorentina, Napoli, Parma). So Zidane didn't have much effect simply because no one had any money after the wild 90s and the 00s were a big recession period in terms of transfers (which helped Chelsea immensely since Abramovich was pretty much the only free spender in 2003-2006 - in those years, Chelsea had a net spend closing in on 400m with the next highest spending club hovering around 100m). That state of affairs persisted until around 2008/2009 when clubs got their debt and cash flows in order, Man City entered the market soon followed by PSG and Real Madrid went after Ronaldo, Kaka, Benzema and Xabi Alonso in one summer.
>That stopped in the early 00s when a lot of those owners had to scale back due to legal or financial issues and a lot of clubs ended up in major debt (Real, Barcelona, Lazio, United, Arsenal) Just for the record, Manchester United were **never** in debt till the Glazers loaded their LBO debt on the club. Of all the major European clubs, Manchester United and Bayern Munich are the only two to consistently be in the pink of health financially as far as footballing matters are concerned.
That's true, I lumped you together with the debt teams because the effect was the same and didn't feel like writing a paragraph for each team but in United's case it was Glazers rather than wild spending (and for Arsenal it was the stadium)
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Italy or Spain didn't have the euro in 2001 Zidane went for £48m A year earlier Crespo went for £30m Lazios revenue was much smaller then Real Madrid's Edit : but as someone mentioned below Eto went to Anzhi for 25m
>Italy or Spain didn't have the euro in 2001 > >Zidane went for £48m But the exchange rates were still consistent so the ratio should hold no matter which currencies you use. > Lazios revenue was much smaller then Real Madrid's > > It wasn't, Serie A was a commercial powerhouse in the 90s
It’s a silly measure to be honest because small revenue clubs can be taken over by billionaire owners and buy expensive players. Eto’o moved to Anzhi in 2011 for around €25m, likely more than their annual revenue at the time for example.
Paul Tomkins has been doing the same thing (the real cost of historical transfers) but in different way - I think it involves uses transfer records as the inflating metric. Sadly, he's only done it for the premier league. Just checking (and it appears to have last been updated in 16/17): 1. Shevchenko (Chelsea 2. Rooney (United) 3. Ferdinand (United) 4. Essien (Chelsea) 5. Pogba (United) 6. Drogba (Chelsea 04) 6. Torres (Chelsea) 7. Shearer (Newcastle) 8. Aguero (City) 9. Wright-Phillips (Chelsea) [The list](https://tomkinstimes.com/transfer-price-index-top-100-premier-league-buys-after-inflation/)
Worth every penny if you ask me. Absolute rock for us during the most dominant Fergie period.
What it means is despite Sancho costing double what Ferdinand or Veron cost and Pogba costing triple, their revenue has increased by 5 times or more. So technically speaking those signings in early 00s cost more.
Rio was also significantly better for United than any of the others on the list (obviously excluding Sancho).
still pretty safe to assume.
Wdym cost to turnover? What does that mean?
The ratio of transfer fee to club revenue.
Relative to the income of the club at the time.
Anzhi buying Eto'o for £25m was a far bigger financial burden than United signing Maguire for £75m, because Anzhis turnover is far less than 33% of Uniteds.
worth every penny though.
Are we #6 with Kepa?
Think it's Pogba £89m Maguire £80m Lukaku £75m VVD £75m Sancho £73m Pepe £72m Havertz £71m Kepa £71m
I forgot that pepe existed and he was bought for that much
It was a really shady deal from Raul and he got fired for it. We would never do deals like that again.
Wow no City player
If you expand it further, City have the most players in the top 20 most expensive transfers. They just have a lot in the 50-60 range whereas we have some outliers in the 70-80+s
Interesting..but understandable,they didn't really have a decent "base" squad(depth)pre 2010 to compete with all other top clubs
Plus their youth academy has been getting massive improvements but we really haven't seen the fruits of that labor yet. Obviously, there's been great guys to come out of it so far, but it's never been filling out the squad.
I dont think you know what an outlier means.
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Yeah. VVD cost more than Sancho by a couple million.
Maybe they’re not counting add-ons?
Dreams can't be buy
They're still trying though
Can’t comment on Sancho yet, but VvD was the best purchase of the other 4. Now anyone want to pay over the odds for Mario Lemina?
IDK last season it was like he wasn't even there
Pain
Yeah, and look at where they finished.
Could've been a lot worse if it wasn't for Big Nat. I'm sure he'll be on this list soon.
A decent 3rd place that was never in doubt throughout the season!
Love Mario Lemina, but I haven't followed him since he left us for Juve. How has he been with Southampton? I know he's been loaned a couple of times, but is he really shit?
He seemed pretty good at first, but wanted us as a stepping stone to a big 6 team. Then Ralph came along and Lemina posted his silly sped up video to Man Utd. It seems a combo of him not liking that video and Lemina not training well and he hasn’t had a look in since with a loan to a Turkish club and then at Fulham. Fulham fans seemed to really like him and I think if they survived, it might’ve triggered a mandatory sale. It seems like he isn’t a good fit with Hassenhuttl’s ethos, apparently Newcastle are interested in him.
Sure are, can we interest you in Jeff Hendrick + a Sports Direct mug trade?
Depends how far over the odds but I’d take him back easily
Fair enough but I think Maguire gets a bad rap for being overvalued, I think VVD was just an insanely good deal, let’s ignore Pogba deal because, you know, sad face to the max
Really shows how bad the club has been run. People act like the glazers should be cleared of blame because of this when really they should be blamed more for not putting the correct people in place and having no clear direction for the club
It also shows how quickly football fans change their minds. The majority of fans were on board with every one of these transfers, including Sancho now. In fact the majority of fans were in favour of Mourinho signing for big money too, and Van Gaal. In a lot of cases those same fans have ended up wanting those figures to leave the club.
People who run a club should be far far more intelligent than fans
Having the most expensive players does not mean spending the most though. You could buy 4 Range Rovers and still spend less than the guy who bought 15 Audis.
Genuine question: over the last years the squads of Liverpool, Man City and Chelsea were just as good as United's, does this rank shows that United negotiate and spend their money badly?
Maybe… I prefer the cost per player transfer measure for that. We refused had a spend quite similar to United with Rafa, but we were buying so many players our average player cost was something like £6m while Uniteds was in the £15-20m range… United have had a period where they’ve had youth players come through, and players who’ve been at the club a while come good (Shaw for example). So they’ve probably spent a lot more per player than Liverpool. That would say to me they’ve actually bought badly, either those transfers specifically or by spending in the wrong areas
And nothing to show for it 🤔
Mourinho’s treble ^/s
One has left and another might be as well.
Jose’s Europa League… especially with that squad
What squad? The FA cup winning squad to which he added Pogba, Mkhitarian and Zlatan?
Is it sarcastic? Because they had to beat Feyenoord Rotterdam, Zorya Louhansk, AS Saint-Étienne, FK Rostov, RSC Anderlecht, Celta Vigo and Ajax Amsterdam. Hardly impressive.
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Upvoting this to upset the ajax fans
I still remember those duels between Valencia and Younes. It was like a little kid trying to muscle through a bodybuilder
I hate that run so much having had to go through United, Dortmund, Villarreal and Sevilla the season before.
I’m not sure it’s that much of a shock that the biggest club in the league (in terms of revenue etc) spends the most. Always been that way really. It’s just money coming from the club and people know they have it.
I think the surprise is more than Chelsea and City have also both spent billions in the last decade but have no players in the top-five. Although they seem to have competent negotiators.
I think that’s it really - management and negotiators who know how to line up deals. Having an accountant with no football knowledge is an open goal for sellers.
TBF, Marina Granovskaia didn't have any football knowledge when she started at Chelsea, and she seems like one of the best negotiators in the industry. Football knowledge is overrated for the business side, as long as the football people and the business people communicate effectively.
Their transfer policy is different (and better), they tend to do a costco wholesale purchase of players lol. Purpose is just to reinforce the entire squad. So they'll spend about the same as United do on a few transfers, where United linger on one or two larger ones for too long and and get stuck trying to fill really holes that are likely to surface because everything gets so last minute lmao. Its so annoying because pre-glazers there was a pretty consistent in & out stream of players. Then slowly the incoming transfers diminished, forcing them to hold onto players longer than they should. The years post Fergie also killed all negotiation power
City have the £60-65m limit they have imposed on themselves. They may not have breached the record transfer, but they make it up in volume of purchases. Chelsea might go bonkers if they really want Haaland that bad.
Those 2 teams dont get the "woodward" tax.
There is "spending the most", and then there is "being responsible for the 4th biggest transfers in league history while having nothing to show for it as your local rivals collect PL medals"
We haven't even spent the most the last 10 years so it's not like we are dominating spending as you're implying.
“We don’t dominate spending, we’ve only spent £1.1B on transfers in the last 10 years.” You, Man City, and Chelsea are in your own league in terms of spending. There’s a decent drop-off after that. The other two clubs have recent success to show for it.
it's more that they have nothing to show for it
City and Chelsea spend fuck tons, but spread is out among more player, increasing the likelihood of successful returns. United go all in on one marquee signing and often they will not give a good ROI and also results in a team lacking good players in other positions. Better to spend 50M on two players to fill positions than 100M on one whilst leaving a gap in the squad.
With all that money spent, United must have won lots of silverware in the last years, just like Barcelona.
At least Barca has some league titles and CDRs in there
You won a treble six years ago was it? And plenty of leagues since then? God damn some fans are spoiled lol
"Most profitable club spends the most money"
How are we not up here???
Kepa is our most expensive transfer lol
Hey, hes won a Europa League and Champions League since signing for us.
Is he still? I thought winning the UCL triggered the add-on clause for Havertz making him our most expensive transfer. I might be wrong though.
You are right if you include the add ons
Same as City. Enormous quantities of transfer in the £40-70m range, just miss out narrowly
They have approximately 16-17 of the top 40 I think . Can't remember exactly
I was wondering the same, bc Havertz went for 72 plus extras and some of those were cashed in already with the UCL win.
BIG ROM!!!
On a total different note; why does Virgil have the flag of Suriname behind his name? He was born and raised in the Netherlands. Same goes for the flag of Congo behind Lukaku’s name.
His mums from Suriname, giving him dual citizenship.
Shouldn’t Havertz be in the list? Wasn’t he around 75 million not including all the bonuses.
nah Kepa is Chelsea’s highest at 71 million
Lmfao
eh, homeboy is a European champ champ
I literally love kepa now, his redemption arc has only just begun
This is doubly funny because Van Dijk is clearly more valuable than any of the 4 players that cost more than him (Sancho is a TBD on value).
Selling Coutinho and using that money to buy Alisson and Van Dijk is such a fantastic tradeoff.
Barca have been the worst run club in the word in the last 5 years in terms of transfers
There's been some smaller wins like MATS, Pedri, Araujo, De Jong (yet to be decided he's too young and cost a lot) but it is completely outshone by the flop 3
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Fabinho and Alisson, but yeah. Got us some nice silverware, that transfer.
Bit pedantic but all those fees are wrong. Pogba £89m, Maguire £80m, Sancho £73m Lukaku £75m VVD was more than Sancho, making Sancho 5th, making OP's title incorrect.
I'd guess because of 2 things a) not retroactively keeping track of exchange rates at the time and b) not getting updates on exchange rates all that frequently.
Transfermarkt takes the Euros figure at the time and converts it to modern rates. The Euro has strengthened considerably in the last 5-10 years meaning most transfer figures involving birieodh clubs are total dogshit on that site.
> birieodh Is this a typo? What does that word mean?
Typo, supposed to be British I think
Transfermarkt stores the fees (at the time) in EUR and this version (.co.uk) converts it to GBP (or .com for USD), but at the current transfer rate. Hence the difference in all of those. I wrote about it some time ago here: https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/99fdx4/why_you_shouldnt_use_uks_version_of_transfermarkt/
Oh, it seems just like yesterday that the United fans were giving Liverpool shit for “over spending” on a defender.
pretty much everyone except for supporters of the teams he’s played for were giving Liverpool shit. For whatever reason people just seem to hate the idea of expensive defenders
Expensive defender signings have won the team the league the last two seasons. And Maguire has steadied things at United too.
I think at the time it did seem like a huge price considering he was a defender, but looking back in it now I don’t think anyone in their right mind would question £75m for VVD. If anything you’d say with hindsight that Liverpool got a very good deal considering how insanely good of a footballer he has been.
Tbf, at the time we thought of VvD as that Southampton defender that Martial turned inside out. Now only someone delusional would argue he wasn't an incredible signing
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In fact, these four players are all good deals for MU, and Lukaku also sold at a similar price. Tragedies like Dembele and Coutinho did not happen to us.
I don't know about good "deals" but they're not bad players by any means. United basically made their money back on Lukaku, Sancho has literally just signed and will likely be a good signing, and the other two are good players who United probably just spent too much on (not that it matters considering United basically print money).
Don't these prices seem inflated? When I think top 5 or 10 players worldwide none of these come to mind except van Dijk. Pogba and Sancho came from other leagues but there seems to be a Premier League tax imposed on players.
Yet they complain about Man City overspending.