28 Jun 2026 17:57:02
In today's £s, Anderson's £116m ranks 31st in most expensive transfers to English clubs.
10 Most expensive:
Shearer £237m
Ferdinand £199m
Veron £179m
Collymore £177m
Torres £158 (to Chelsea)
Bergkamp £156m
Cole £154m
Shevchenko £153
Yorke £155
Pogba £152
Note that 5 of the top 10 are United players and Rooney comes in at #11. Once the Glazers arrived, there ceased to be any value in the market although we did stump up the equivalent of £130m for Di Maria @#19. Man Utd's revenues back in 2005 were £176m, making the club the richest in the world.
With European football back, I would expect that to be less than 22-25% of next season's.
Besides the obvious - that we were once able to spend big on a consistent basis to buy top talent - it also shows how inflation has necessarily caused the price of players to rise. So, maybe £70m is simply both the standard and a reasonable price to pay for any player just short of the top echelon. Obviously one has to select right. Let's hope we do.
29 Jun 2026 08:50:15
I'm not sure I agree with the higher estimates being suggested.
If you look at standard inflation, £1,000 in 2000 is roughly equivalent to about £1,918 today - an increase of around 1.9x. Applying that same logic, Rio Ferdinand's £30m transfer in 2002 would come out at somewhere in the region of £58m-£60m in today's money.
I understand the argument that football transfer fees have grown faster than general inflation, but jumping to figures close to £200m feels excessive.
29 Jun 2026 11:55:41
The best way to work out football inflation would be to use % of revenue. So, in 2002, Ferdinand cost £30m, and Utd's revenue was £146m, which is roughly 21%. Utd's revenue in 2025 was 666.5m, which would mean Ferdinand's fee would be £140.8m.
Back in 2002, Real also paid roughly £30m for 26-year-old R9, and I doubt anyone these days wouldn't pay £140m for prime R9.