The article discusses the common perception of transfer market spending in football and its actual impact on team success. Drawing on insights from the book "Soccernomics," it highlights that team wages are predictive of success, while transfer spending lacks correlation with on-field performance. Utilizing a dataset of the 200 most expensive player transfers over the past decade, the article aims to uncover the average expectations in player performance relative to transfer fees, suggesting that the obsession with transfer market dynamics may be misguided.
In their oft-updated book, "Soccernomics," authors Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski laid out a pretty strong statistical case: Though team wages are extremely predictive of team success, the amount teams spend in the transfer market has almost no correlation to success.
The success rate of big-money transfers is very mixed. Ousmane Dembélé to Barcelona for €135 million worked out horribly; Dembélé to PSG for €50 million worked out beautifully.
The math is the math, but surely we can learn something from big-money transfers, right? In pursuit of some answers, I created a data set... 200 most expensive transfers of every season for the past decade - 2,000 deals.
It's a maddening thing to realize, considering how much time we spend obsessing over the transfer market.
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