Market value change is a flawed scorecard for Premier League recruitment

Key takeaways

• A rise or fall in a player's estimated market value mostly reflects age, contract length and visibility, and only partly reflects how much the player contributed to the club.
• Clubs that buy young players are likely to look good on market value tables, while clubs that buy experienced players to win now are likely to look bad, whatever results either approach produces.
• Market values are estimates, not prices. They often move after transfer fees are paid, so they can echo the market rather than measure it.
• These tables are useful for spotting resale potential and accounting risk, but they need to be read next to sporting output and financial context, not instead of them.

The argument: a valuation table measures the wrong thing

A post on Reddit's r/soccer forum has drawn attention to a familiar kind of comparison: how the market value of players signed by Premier League clubs over roughly the last five years has changed since they arrived. The post's title describes the subject. Its figures, its data source and its method are not reproduced here and should not be assumed. The format is still worth looking at in its own right, because tables like this are often treated as a verdict on which clubs recruit well and which waste money.

The argument here is simple. Change in market value is a reasonable measure of one thing: how the wider football economy now prices a squad's assets compared with when they arrived. It is a poor measure of recruitment quality. Recruitment exists to make a team better at football within a budget. A player can raise a side's level for years while his estimated value falls steadily. Another can do little for his club while his value rises, because he is young, has a long contract and plays in a league that buyers watch closely. Calling the first a failure and the second a success confuses an asset's balance-sheet story with its footballing purpose.

None of this makes the tables worthless. It means they answer a narrower question than the one people usually put to them, and three structural features of how market values work explain why.

The age curve does most of the work

The biggest single driver of a player's estimated value is his position on the age curve. In broad terms, valuations rise through the early twenties, level off around the middle of a career and then fall as a player gets older. This is not a judgement on ability. It reflects how long a buying club could expect to use the player and how much it could recover by selling him on. A player of twenty-two has a long period of potential service and resale ahead. A player of thirty has a short one, however good he is.

That has a predictable effect on any table of value change. A club that signs mostly young players starts every deal on the rising part of the curve. If the players simply mature and keep a place in the squad, their values tend to go up. A club that signs experienced players at their peak starts on the flat part of the curve or near the top of the falling part. Even if those players perform exactly as hoped, their values will usually go down over five years, simply because five years have passed.

So a five-year window builds in a bias. It rewards a recruitment model aimed at development and resale, and it penalises a model aimed at immediate competitiveness. Both are legitimate strategies. A club fighting relegation may sensibly pay for proven experience because the cost of going down is far greater than any loss in resale value. A club competing for the title may buy a player at his peak because it needs certainty now. A value-change table will mark both decisions down without asking whether they did the job they were meant to do.

The age effect also hides inside averages. A club whose aggregate figure looks impressive may have one or two young signings whose values have risen sharply, alongside many whose contribution was modest. Without the distribution, a single total is hard to interpret.

Market values are estimates that follow fees

The second problem is what a market value actually is. The figures in public comparisons of this kind usually come from valuation websites. The best known is Transfermarkt, which publishes estimates produced by a community of contributors and moderators. These are informed opinions, not transaction prices. A player's estimated value only becomes a real number at the moment a club pays it, and most players are not sold in any given year.

This matters in two ways. First, the starting point of the comparison is often not the estimate before the deal but the fee itself, or an estimate that was revised towards the fee once it became public. Premier League clubs, with their broadcast income, routinely pay more than clubs elsewhere would for the same player. If the starting value is set by an inflated fee, the player begins his time in England with a built-in loss on paper, which may say more about the buyer's spending power and the seller's negotiating position than about the player.

Second, estimates react to visibility. A player at a club that regularly plays in European competition, or who is linked with moves in the media, tends to have his estimate revised more often and more sharply than a player at a club that attracts less attention. Some of the movement in a value-change table therefore measures how much notice a player gets, not how good he has become.

None of this is a criticism of the people who build these estimates. Valuing footballers is hard, and a consistent public estimate is useful. But a metric that partly tracks fees and attention cannot also serve as an independent judge of whether those fees were wise.

Contracts and accounting shape value as much as performance does

The third problem is the contract. A player's value to any buyer depends heavily on how long he has left on his deal. A player with a long contract can only be bought for a fee the selling club accepts. A player nearing the end of his contract can soon leave for nothing, so his value falls as the expiry date gets closer, whatever his form.

Over a five-year window this effect is large. Many players signed five years ago will have contracts that are running down or have been renewed on new terms. Two identical players, one recently extended and one in his final season, can carry very different estimated values. A table that ignores this mixes contract management with recruitment.

Accounting adds another layer. Under the amortisation method used in English football, a club spreads the cost of a transfer fee across the length of the player's contract, and the player's book value falls each year until it reaches zero. The Premier League's financial rules, the Profit and Sustainability Rules, make that accounting treatment matter. Selling a player for more than his remaining book value records a profit, which helps a club stay within the limits. This is why market value change does mean something real for clubs. A squad that holds its value gives a club more options to raise money within the rules.

But this is exactly the narrower question noted earlier. Value change tells you about a club's room for financial manoeuvre. It does not tell you whether the players helped the team win matches, which is the purpose of signing them.

The case against: value change is the market's verdict, and the market is not stupid

The strongest objection deserves a fair hearing. It goes like this. Market values, whatever their flaws, combine the views of many observers and react to how players actually play. A player who performs well over several seasons is more likely to be valued highly by other clubs, to attract offers and to be revised upwards. A player who struggles is more likely to be revised downwards. Over five years, and across a whole squad, the noise from individual estimates should partly cancel out, leaving a signal that is linked, however loosely, to quality.

The objection continues that clubs themselves care about this signal. In a league where financial rules limit spending, the ability to buy players who keep or grow their value is a form of competitive advantage. A club that repeatedly buys players whose values collapse is likely to find its future spending squeezed. On this view, value change is not a distraction from recruitment quality but part of what recruitment quality means in the modern Premier League. Supporters who dismiss it may be ignoring the constraint that shapes every club's transfer window.

Finally, the objection points out that age is not a hidden bias but a decision. Buying older players is a choice with known costs, and a table that shows those costs is simply being honest.

This is a serious case. It is right that financial rules make value retention matter, and right that age-related decline is a cost clubs choose to accept. Where it falls short is in treating a cost as a verdict. Knowing that a strategy has a resale cost is useful. Concluding that the strategy failed because it carried that cost is a different claim, and the table alone cannot support it.

What would change this conclusion

The argument here would be weakened by evidence that market value change predicts sporting outcomes once age and contract length are controlled for. If a comparison adjusted for the age curve, by comparing each signing with typical players of the same age and position, and adjusted for contract status, and still found that clubs with better value change achieved better league finishes relative to their spending, that would be strong evidence that the metric captures recruitment quality and not just demographics.

It would also be weakened if it could be shown that valuation estimates move mainly with on-pitch contribution and only a little with fees, visibility or league profile. Independent analysis of how and when estimates are revised would help here, and the methodology behind any particular chart, including the one shared on Reddit, would need to be stated clearly before its conclusions could be tested.

On the other side, the conclusion would be strengthened by evidence that clubs with poor value-change records reached their stated sporting aims, such as survival, European qualification or trophies, at a reasonable cost per point. That would show the two measures pulling apart in practice.

Until that kind of evidence is available, value-change tables are best read as a measure of resale risk: informative and relevant under financial rules, but not a final judgement on who recruits well.

Sources and further reading

• Reddit, r/soccer forum: the discussion post that prompted this piece, whose figures and method are not reproduced here
• Transfermarkt: an example of a crowd-sourced player valuation site, useful for understanding how public market value estimates are produced
• Premier League handbook: the league's published rules, including its Profit and Sustainability Rules
• Football finance research from accountancy firms and academic sport economists: background on amortisation and how transfer fees are treated in club accounts