A Comprehensive Model For Evaluating Total Team Valuation (TTV)

Chelsea 2006/07.  The Premier League's all-time most expensive team at £657M in 2010 CTTV.

I just made my latest post over at the Transfer Price Index blog.  Our working group has been lucky enough to exchange data with Stefan Szymanski, which has given us access to a complete list of Premier League club wages for every club in every season through 2009/2010.  This newly available wage data has allowed me to create a comprehensive wages and transfer valuation model to estimate the cost of assembling and paying a year's worth of wages for any team.  Knowing what the total team valuation (TTV) is for each club for each season then allowed me to create current valuation factors (e.g. Premier League-specific inflation factors) that communicate the current cost of assembling prior teams (CTTV).  Finally, regression models were updated and we now also fully understand how much a club must spend in player wages and transfer fees to compete for the top spots in the league.  I'd highly recommend heading over to the TPI and have a read.

I am extremely grateful to Prof. Szymaski for his willingness to share his data.  It is part of a much larger data set he and his research group will use to study more than 40 years of English soccer from multiple economics angles.  I will keep you informed of any papers or books he publishes, as I am sure they will contain wonderful insights that will go way beyond my one dimensional analysis at the TPI blog.

Finally, I am extremely appreciative of Prof. Szymaski's and Simon Kuper's continuing dialogue on this topic.  It's clear that both of them have a different opinion than the authors of the TPI as to the relative impact of transfer fees on the game of soccer.  Nonetheless, we have an ongoing and continual dialogue via email and interviews, with the latest installment of the running dialogue found in Kuper's and Szymanski's expanded and updated second edition of Soccernomics that was released yesterday.  I picked up my copy on its release date, and as a humble brag I would recommend checking out page 413 of the book to see their thoughts on the TPI.  I will be pouring through the book in the next two weeks in preparation for an interview with both men that will hopefully shed more light on the topics contained in its covers.  Based upon what I was able to preview via Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, I highly recommend you pick up a copy as well and see what's contained in the additional 100 pages of material.