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Is Angel di Maria the ‘real’ record holder?
27th August 2014
With all the flurry of football transfer activity happening over the summer months and Manchester United spending a hefty £59.7m for Argentinian winger Angel di Maria, there has been lots of talk about transfer records. With this transfer surpassing the £50m paid by Chelsea for Fernando Torres, the record for a British transfer fee has changed a lot since the first holder of the title, Willie Groves in 1893 went for just £100. You can get a nice history here in this article at the BBC http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/28939359. These figures do not represent the 'real' value of the transfers however..
As all good economists know, comparing prices from one year to the other requires us to adjust prices for inflation and to state them in real terms. So that’s what I did for the British transfer records over time by using this handy calculator: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html. It should be noted that it adjusts for RPI rather than CPI. There is potential scope for getting students to do some index based calculations here (if given enough data) for them to find their own values. I’m planning on using this resource to get them to work out how they would find out who really is the most expensive player in the world.
So in answer to the original question, di Maria is the ‘real’ record holder for British transfers at least. Whereas Cristiano Ronaldo still has bragging rights over his teammate Gareth Bale. Whichever way you look at Andy Carroll’s transfer fee though, it’s still a rip off.
Side note: As a Leicester fan, I thought I’d do a bit of research on our old and new transfer record holders. The not quite so prolific Ade Akinbiyi was bought for £5.5m in 2000, whilst our latest record holder Leo Ulloa was bought for £8m. Once adjusted for inflation however, it turns out that Ade still holds the ‘real’ record. The value of his transfer in today’s money is £8.33m.
Feel free to download the resource below and use as you wish and let me know if you have any ideas of how you plan to use it @mrwoodeco: