Sumin Says: The problem with European soccer’s transfer market

Sumin Kim, Columnist

On August 31st, 2017, the summer transfer market officially ended. This transfer market was one of the hottest transfer markets in the history of European soccer. Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) used approximately €222M ($266M) to sign Neymar, and now PSG has to pay Monaco €180M ($215M) before the 2018/2019 season starts.

A year ago, José Mourinho, Current Manchester United Manager, said Pogba’s transfer fee (€150M) is going to become cheaper in a few years. It turns out this statement was true. In just one year, the world’s most expensive player changed to Neymar with €222M of transfer fee.

Now we have a problem: when is this market inflation going to stop?

In my opinion this market inflation has to be stopped by some kind of regulation. A player used to be worth £5M; now almost every player starts with £10M. This is just ridiculous.

Now, €10M for each player isn’t even worth enough to come out as a news headline. If a club spent more than £10M per player, they will need much more money than just £10M, and that indicates just how much the European soccer market has expanded.

However, if someone were to ask if the market actually expanded, I would have to say no. Economy analyzing company “Vysyble” published a report about the Premier League (PL) clubs. The report said that the PL clubs have an average of  £876,000 deficit every day. In the report, Vysyble said that PL is economically failing. Big clubs are spending so much money on transfers and player salaries, however their income does not match the immense spendings.

The second reason is that people can’t understand why clubs are using so much money on “non-verified” players. In 2016, Manchester bought Paul Pogba for £100M from Juventus. This year they bought Lukaku for £100M from Everton. They are both great players, however people are questioning if they’re actually worth that much money.

Most of the PL clubs now have a chance to do a “big signing”. A big signing refers to the process where a club buys famous players with a big transfer budget. Because of the whole league over-investing issue, the players’ prices increase.

There were a limited numbers of players who are already verified, so clubs started to value players based on their future ability over their current ability.

This process lead to many failures, and the profit did not match the tremendous amount of investments spent, resulting in some clubs finding themselves in an economic crisis.

There is already an existing solution for this market inflation, which is named the Financial Fair Play (FFP), but there are just so many ways to get around it. A great example is PSG who spent €405M. UEFA is investigating the FFP issue, however most people think they can efficiently get around it. In my opinion, UEFA has to make the FFP regulation more strict so it becomes actually effective.

Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United only used €789M throughout his 30 year period in Man United, and was able to win 38 trophies. But after him, three managers spent nearly €777M in five years. This inflation has to be stopped to avoid an economic crisis.