In a week in which English under-21 international Tom Ince has had a £8million bid accepted for his services and Spanish international David Villa has been valued at £4.4million, you can see the huge gulf in the valuation of players from England compared to the rest of Europe.
For a number of years now there seems to be an unwanted trend of players within the English Premier League been sold or valued at enormous overpriced amounts. There seems to be less value for money within England compared to other countries.
In June 2013 England’s under 21 squad travelled to Israel for the European Championships, players such as Tottenham’s Steven Caulker, Liverpool’s Jordan Henderson and Manchester United Wilfred Zaha, them three alone demand a transfer fee of approximately £42 million. You would expect a team that included players worth such an amount of money to succeed at the championships, but as we all know that is not the case, as they did not win one game.
Obviously it is not the player who give themselves the amount they are valued at, but the higher the value certainly does not hurt their reputation.
Back in 2010 Andy Carroll joined Liverpool for a staggering £35 million, this was due to an impressive two seasons with Newcastle United, in the two mentioned seasons he scored 30 goals in 62 appearances. I do agree that this is a very good goal return, but we need to remember 19 of his goals were in the championships. In my opinion it was great business for Newcastle getting such an enormous amount for a player that was still proving himself in the Premier league, and as we have seen the move did not work out well for the player, with his goal return 11 in 55 appearances. One question to be asked was did the pressure of his worth effect the player?
Now if we compare this to £2 million Swansea city striker Michu, who was in my opinion, bargain of the year. Signed from Rayo Vallecano, he has lit up the league with his goals and performances.
In England it is the norm to pay ridiculous amounts for players, whether they are proven in the premier league or not, but again if we look at our national team, we have recently fell to 13th in the league, and again the net worth of the players in the squad is outstanding. How can a player justify being worth such an amount, yet do not play to anywhere near the standard you would expect.
Obviously football is now a business, and like any other business, it needs money to succeed, but how far will prices actually go. Recently there has been talk of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid for £100million, which proves its not just English clubs that are willing to spend these amounts. It was only in 1979 that the first £1 million player was bought and now 34 years later, an amount like that would be hard to come buy for top players. I do feel that this trend cannot carry on, but I do think it will get worse before it gets better, but until then clubs will continue to fall into to debt in order to sign over priced players.