• The results suggests that the financial gap between the Haves and Have-Nots has closed massively in recent seasons, having first exploded in 2003; and that the league is now as competitive as it’s ever been in the modern era.
The Premier League from 2003-2015 is likely to have contained the most expensive teams in the entire history of the sport in England, when adjusted for inflation; but FFP and PSR have reversed the financial gulfs in the game in this country; and now we’re into the Squad Cost Ratio era.
Dr Ian Graham’s book “How To Win The Premier League” includes the following acknowledgment of my work:
“I am not the first to point out the surprisingly large proportion of failed transfers. Paul Tomkins’ book ‘Pay As You Play’ [2010] looked at transfer fee inflation in the Premier League. A few years later, he revisited the work in his blog, the Tomkins Times, and compared transfer fees to ‘success’. His method for measuring success was more complicated than ours [at Liverpool], with the benchmark depending on a weighted mixture of transfer fee paid, inflation, transfer fee received and number of games started. Tomkins’ conclusion was that only 40% of transfers succeed. This is a lower success rate than my simple starts-based measure but is in the same ballpark.”
So I’ve been covering this issue for a while now, and believe that our Transfer Price Index (co-created with Graeme Riley for TTT) was the first to model football inflation.
In this article I will revisit my work on this subject, that began 16 years ago, with the latest figures and analysis, and some new ways at looking at the data.
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