Every year, after the NFL draft, everyone is talking about “steals” and “reaches.” The “steals” are the players that the football-watching public thinks went way later than their talent warranted. And the “reaches” are the players we thought went way higher than they should’ve.
It turns out: we’re only half right.
A 2021 study by Timo Riske of Pro Football Focus looked back at six years of draft data and identified the players who went significantly higher or lower than the consensus of publicly available draft rankings. What he found is that the players who were “reaches” did underperform, on average, compared to the other players drafted at the same pick in other years. But the players who were “steals”? They didn’t perform any better than we’d expect, based on their draft position.
The elegance of this study comes in the rationality of its explanation. For a player to be a true “reach,” only one team has to make a player-evaluation mistake. For a player to be a true “steal,” almost the entire NFL has to make a player-evaluation mistake, and NFL teams have access to way more information than the general public does.
I bring this up because I think a similar heuristic might apply to the soccer transfer market. It’s very easy for one club to lock onto a player and pay way more than any other would have ever considered. It’s much harder for every club with the requisite budget to undervalue the same talented player. This is why there’s a common refrain among data-based thinkers in the soccer world: Hire me just so I can tell you “no” a couple times a year, and I’ll be worth it.
So, with the transfer window now closed across Europe’s top leagues, what moves look like the biggest reaches? Who might’ve benefitted from someone on staff saying “no”? Here are the top 13 most questionable transfers of this summer window.
– The best worst transfers: Why Sancho, Werner were good moves
– Striker domino effect: How Premier League clubs net out
– Men’s transfer grades: What moves mean across Europe
-Age: 26
-Fee: 70 million
-Market value (per Transfermarkt): 60 million
-Projected negative differential between fee and value in a year: 16.7%
Last summer, I wrote about a simple transfer projection system that NFL analyst Kevin Cole helped me create. And we’re using that same system to come up with these rankings. Here’s an excerpt:
To varying degrees, a lower age, a lower transfer fee, and a higher market value at the time of the transfer made it more likely there was an increase in value after a year. Then, we can take those factors and create a formula to predict an increase or decrease in value for any big transfer.
In other words: a year from now, is a player’s market value likely to be higher or lower than their transfer fee, and by how much?
This is a basic analysis, and it doesn’t account for the extra costs of player wages, which can vary significantly. Plus, we’re using estimated numbers from Transfermarkt to come up with the market values and the fees, which often contain add-ons.
However, studies have found that Transfermarkt values tend to be pretty close to true player value on average, and it also lets us harness the power of the wisdom of the crowds: The market values on the site are a pretty good representation of what the world thinks of a player. At least based on our analysis, when teams have paid significantly more than the Transfermarkt value for a player, those moves have tended to not work out.
Fitting with what I said earlier: When I looked at last summer’s 30 most expensive transfers, the system was much better at projecting the misses than it was nailing the hits. Among the players projected to see a less than 1% increase in value, I’d say one of the 12 (Elliot Anderson to Nottingham Forest) was a true success. Three of the players, João Palhinha, João Félix, and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall are already playing for new teams.
Arsenal’s transfer approach this summer was seemingly designed to rate poorly in these projections: They want to win now and don’t seem to care much about how things might look down the road. The Gunners have signed three players age 26 or older for 65 million or more.
-Age: 28
-Fee: 25 million
-Market value: 25 million
-Projected negative differential: 17%
There are two Zenit players on Carlo Ancelotti’s most recent Brazil roster. And neither of them are named “Gerson.”
-Age: 28
-Fee: 70 million
-Market value: 70 million
-Projected negative differential: 17%
Diaz was fantastic for Liverpool last season, but there are only three 28-year-olds who required a higher transfer fee than what Bayern Munich paid to acquire him:
-Eden Hazard: 120.8 million, Chelsea to Real Madrid
-Antoine Griezmann: 120 million, Atletico Madrid to Barcelona
-Romelu Lukaku: 113 million, Inter Milan to Chelsea
-Gonzalo Higuain: 90 million, Napoli to Juventus
Hazard might be the worst transfer of all time, Lukaku lasted one season at Chelsea, and Griezmann and Higuain made it two full years with Barcelona and Juventus, respectively, before moving elsewhere. All of these players were held in similar — if not higher — esteem to Diaz at the time of their moves. For as good as Diaz has looked to start the season, history is not on Bayern’s side with this one.
-Age: 29
-Fee: 25 million
-Market value: 30 million
-Projected negative differential: 17.3%
The Saudi Pro League isn’t operating on the same economic terms as the rest of the soccer world. They’re not constrained by Profit and Sustainability Rules, UEFA regulations, or even more universal concerns like “budgets,” “profits,” and “the value of money.” They’re also typically paying such inflated salaries to players that looking at only the transfer fees tells an even smaller part of the story than it usually does.
But just for fun, I wanted to see if any of the deals they’ve made this summer actually project well based on our simple model. And one of them actually does. While it seemed as if Enzo Millot was headed to Atletico Madrid, Al Ahli swooped in and nabbed the 23-year-old attacking midfielder from Stuttgart for 30 million. Transfermarkt put his market value at 35 million, and a year from now that number projects to be 17.5% higher than the fee Al Ahli paid. That would make Millot the 24th “best” transfer of the summer.
-Age: 26
-Fee: 74.2 million
-Market value: 60 million
-Projected negative differential: 21.02%
We’ll dig in here when we get to another Man United signing on this list. Can you guess who?
-Age: 25
-Fee: 140 million
-Market value: 120 million
-Projected negative differential: 26%
This nicely encapsulates the upside and downside of spending more money on a transfer fee than any club not owned by the nation of Qatar ever has.
It’s pretty much impossible for Isak to give Liverpool more than they’ve invested in acquiring him. If he wins the Ballon d’Or, then maybe you could say that. But basically, Isak has to be one of the 10 or 15 best players in the world — immediately and then for many more years after that for this deal to “break even” in any kind of value sense.
Unlike the club’s two other major moves for youngsters Hugo Ekitike and Florian Wirtz, Isak is 25, already in his prime. He turns 26 next month. This is it.
Plus, well, I’m not convinced that Isak is in that absolute top tier of elite talent. He has never scored 20 non-penalty goals in a season. Heck, he has hit double digits only three times. And he played fewer than two-thirds of the available Premier League minutes in his three years with Newcastle. The overwhelmingly likely outcome is that Isak nets out somewhere below “140 million player” when all is said and done.
But barring injury, which is a concern, given Isak’s lack of ability, there’s probably quite a high floor here, too.
Sure, the model projects Isak’s crowd-sourced value to be 26% lower, come this time next year, than that 140 million fee Liverpool paid. But even with that decline, Liverpool would still have a starting striker valued at somewhere around 104 million.
-Age: 25
-Fee: 75 million
-Market value: 55 million
-Projected negative differential: 21.6%
OK, now we can talk about Cunha and Mbeumo together. I’ve already written a bunch about these moves and why I didn’t like them — and the first couple of games already started to prove this out.
Manchester United paid a lot of money for two players who outperformed their expected-goals numbers by massive amounts and by much more than they’d ever done before. It was incredibly unlikely that both players, let alone one of them, would continue to convert their chances at such high rates. Through the games against Fulham and Arsenal, they’ve combined for 12 shots worth 1.21 xG and zero goals:
Even without the goals, I think Mbeumo and Cunha have still made Manchester United better. They were quite competitive at home against Arsenal, and then they played Fulham even on the road. But that’s the thing: These were two already-in-their-prime, competent Premier League players with no real chance of ever becoming stars. They were going to improve Manchester United in the short term because Manchester United finished last season in 15th place.
Now, they look as if they’re about as good as Fulham. That would be a 12-point improvement on last season. And it would still only get them up to 11th place in the table.
-Age: 27
-Fee: 22.2 million
-Market value: 8 million
-Projected negative differential: 26.82%
I, uh, yeah: This one beats me! Sporting replaced Viktor Gyokeres with the 27-year-old not-that-Luis Suarez on a five-year contract. The fee makes him the third-most expensive player the club has ever acquired, after Manuel Ugarte and Gyokeres. Given that both of those players eventually moved for big fees to bigger clubs, maybe I shouldn’t be doubting them. But it sure seems as if they think they can do the Gyokeres thing again.
They signed Gyokeres at 25, after he’d washed out at Brighton and played well in the Championship. He dominated the Portuguese league and then moved to Arsenal this summer. With Suarez, they signed him at 27, after he scored 19 non-penalty goals and added eight assists in Spain. But not in LaLiga — this was in the second division.
Before that, he’d played four first-division seasons mostly in Spain but with a half-season in France, and he’d scored 25 goals and added 10 assists — total.
-Age: 27
-Fee: 69.3 million
-Market value: 55 million
-Projected negative differential: 26.93%
On paper, this deal projects poorly, but I want to step away from age curves and algorithms for a second. I hope this move works out. Eze grew up rooting for Arsenal, played for them at early youth levels, but was released when he was 13. Then he bounced around the lower levels of England for a while, made his pro debut with Wycombe in League Two, spent a few years with Queens Park Rangers in the Championship, and eventually signed with Palace in 2020.
Now, 14 years later, he’s back at the club that gave up on him, trying to help them win their first major title since he was 6 years old. He worked his butt off and finally got to where he has always wanted to be. This video, I mean, c’mon:
As I mentioned earlier, Arsenal are trying to win now. Their net spend on transfer fees this summer is 285.5 million, way higher than any other club in the world. And they’re pushing the majority of their resources toward players who are already well into their primes, as opposed to what they’d done in the past: targeting players who would spend all their best years at the club. That’s a massive risk.
And I think that’s especially true with this deal. It makes Eze the third-most expensive 27-year-old ever: behind Luis Suarez (Liverpool to Barcelona) and Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Inter Milan to Barcelona) and ahead of Kaka (AC Milan to Real Madrid), Riyad Mahrez (Leicester City to Manchester City), and Ángel Di María (Manchester United to PSG).
The hit rate with those moves is mixed, and those players were all established, title-winning superstars. We still haven’t seen Eze play at that level yet.
There’s still a chance, though, that it all works out.
-Age: 26
-Fee: 68.25 million
-Market value: 45 million
-Projected negative differential: 30.98%
Before last season, his first with Atalanta, Retegui had never scored more than 13 non-penalty goals in a season — in any professional league, in any country — and he’d never generated more than two assists. This was a goal-scoring striker who didn’t really score many goals.
Plug him into Gianpiero Gasperini’s system for a season, though, and you get 21 non-penalty goals and eight assists. He joined from Genoa for 20.9 million. A year later, he’s leaving for more than triple that fee.
A quick word of warning to the rest of the world: the fee paid for Retegui is the second-biggest Atalanta has ever received. Right behind him: Teen Koopmeiners, who had three goals and three assists for Juventus last season. And right ahead of him: Rasmus Højlund, who is already on his way out at Manchester United.
-Age: 28
-Fee: 57.7 million
-Market value: 32 million
-Projected negative differential: 45.27%
This feels like a good example of why (A) you don’t let your best player leave on the last day of the window, and (B) you don’t pay for past performance.
The whole Isak saga felt pretty pointless in the end. If Newcastle had just made the move two months ago, then they would’ve had … [does math] … two months to figure out how best to replace him.
Granted, they did try to find his replacements earlier this summer — and kept failing. But I’m not sure how you can look at this move, and then one at the top (bottom?) of this list and not see a team that’s suddenly realizing the season’s already started, the Champions League is coming, and they might have no one to play striker.
Wissa has been one of the most underrated players in the Premier League for the past couple of seasons, but last season he hit a new level: 0.71 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes, after averaging just slightly over 0.5 in the three previous seasons. If Wissa were 23 or 24, you could make a pretty good case that he’d “made the leap,” that this was his new expected level of play. But Wissa turns 29 this week.
The way more likely explanation is that he just had the best season of his life, and it’s probably not going to happen again.
-Age: 33
-Fee: 22 million
-Market value: 20 million
-Projected negative differential: 48.2%
This is the highest transfer fee ever paid by an MLS club, and it’s the third-highest fee ever paid by any club for a player 33 or older. Only Cristiano Ronaldo’s 117 million move to Juventus from Real Madrid and Robert Lewandowski’s 45 million move to Barcelona from Bayern Munich cost more. Both of those players scored a ton of goals for their new clubs, and I’d suspect Son will do the same, in a much less competitive environment.
The move makes sense for LAFC, a club in MLS, a league that tends to sign players before retirement. For just about any other team in the world, though, it wouldn’t make any sense.
-Age: 23
-Fee: 85 million
-Market value: 30 million
-Projected negative differential: 48.5%
Let’s say there was this really tall striker with great feet for a player his size. In his first professional season, he was playing on loan in the third division in Germany, and he was … fine. As a 20-year-old, he played a little over 2,000 minutes and scored nine non-penalty goals. A 19-year-old scored the same number of goals in the same league. Another 20-year-old scored three more.
The following season, this tall striker played about 1,200 minutes in the Bundesliga. Given that he was making a two-tier jump, he did about how you might expect: two goals across 12 starts. Then, in his third year as a full-time pro, he finally seemed as if he’d begun to develop. He started half of his team’s matches and scored 10 non-penalty goals.
This is also the player that Newcastle United have decided to invest more than half of the Alexander Isak money into.
There’s no more to the story — those were Woltemade’s last three seasons. Across his 29 starts in the Bundesliga, he has scored 12 goals. He has never played more than 1,700 minutes in a first-division season. And at 23, his peak years aren’t even that far away.
Could Woltemade develop into a star striker who lives up to the club-record fee? Absolutely — but that’s also the absolute best-case scenario. Given his incredibly limited track record, Woltemade could just as easily be out of the Premier League in a year or two.