The Concept
Everything Iâm about to describe hinges on one universal fact. Sports money is exponential in regard to talent. This is true across several top sports, in cricket, football, baseball, you name it. The best players will be sold for 5 or 10x more than players who are still top-division talents, and those players will usually be 5-10x more expensive than those at the top of the 2nd tier of competition. This leads to some weird stuff when it comes to developing youth players.
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Letâs take Manchester City FC, for example. When you add together expenses, a small salary, and facilities, youâre looking at around 15,000 GBP a year to keep a good 16-year talent. When they produce a player like Foden he reaches adulthood with an estimated transfer worth of around 100 million. At those numbers, you could break even on training 6500 talented 16-year-olds if just 1 of them turns into Phil Foden.
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That ratio is really absurd. As a result, in many large sports, but especially football, the youth academy system is brutal, churns through a huge number of kids and still makes a profit, because you can churn as much as you want as long as youâre the ones who get the Phil-Foden-equivalent player signed on to a professional contract.
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This creates a weird dynamic where young players with only a 1 in 1000 chance of becoming a big player are worth taking a punt on. For this reason, it can actually be almost beneficial for someone to have a quirk or clear flaw in their game. A well-rounded, very talented young cricketer in India will be one of thousands of very promising, well-rounded young talents, but someone whoâs a similar level of player, who, for example, bowls pace with a bent front leg like James Anderson, stands out.
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He very famously had coaches try to make his action conventional, and his bowling suffered for it for a while. Despite this, sometimes recoaching/rebuilding someoneâs technique and fixing their flaw does work. And the allure that it might be possible is what makes good-but-flawed young talents so tempting when compared to the very immaculate technique of an equally skilled child.
Nicholas Jackson, a practical example
Going back to football, Iâd like to put forward âNicolas Jacksonâ as a real-life example of a player with a financial value that does not match his stats, because of this âallureâ. I think this practical example is necessary to demonstrate how this can work.
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At age 21, Nicolas Jackson had an exciting breakout season at Villarreal in the Spanish league. Chelsea committed around 37mil GBP on him. At Chelsea, as a solo centre striker, he scored 24 goals in 65 games across 2 seasons. This is the sort of performance that just gets close to justifying the fee, but weak enough that Chelsea were looking for someone who scored more than 1 per 3 games. Despite this, his market value was set at 50++ Mill, with genuine interest from suitors in paying this. Eventually, he went on an expensive loan to Bayern Munich, a team that generally would never touch a player that the 5-6th best team in England doesnât want. Let alone for 50 million.
Therefore, it is clear there is some allure beyond his goals. That allure is potential. In 24-25, despite scoring 10, xG says that from the shots he had, he shouldâve scored 17.66 goals. Thatâs clearly a negative trait; he canât turn those shots into goals as well as the models predict a striker should. Yet this is exactly what gives him value. To get nearly 18 xG of shots, you have to be creating chances.
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One stats provider puts his âChances Createdâ at 62 in these 65 games. Meaning he created a significant opportunity for a goal basically every single game, which is huge. Therefore, if you could just fix his conversion, turn him from 18xG and 10 real goals into 18xG and 18 real goals, then he becomes worth 90-100 Mill. If you think youâve got a 30% chance of making him worth 90 Mill and a 70% chance he stays worth 30 Mill⌠That puts his true value at 48 Mill (0.3x90 + 0.7x30).
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This is the sort of maths occurring in teamsâ minds. With youth players, it gets exponentially more drawn out, as shown by the Foden example, but even at the already elite level, you can add 15-20 Million to a playerâs price tag on just the promise, or hope, that he might be able to get his clinicality somewhere close to the level of all his other talents.
Currently⌠Nicolas Jackson has not done this nor truly been given the opportunity to do this, struggling for minutes at Bayern Munich. If we boldly assume Jackson will never âcome goodâ at chance conversion metrics, we can expect his transfer value to slowly regress. By the time heâs around 27, suitors will think, âIf he canât do it yet, itâs probably not happeningâ. At this point, his value will then equalise to the value that his stats currently suggest.
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I do need to caveat this with the fact that football transfer fees are actually largely dictated by contract length, relative desires to meet certain financial targets within clubs, and a range of non-footballing factors. Talking about playersâ values in transfer fees can be a bit reductive, and Iâd rather be able to do it in wage-value⌠but those are mostly not publicly accessible, so I canât: You will have to accept the above proxy analysis, just know that Transfer Value is an inexact metric.
In Conclusion
Regardless of the above disclaimer, I think he provides a real-life example of this scouting phenomenon. At almost all levels of serious professional sport, the exponential value structure lends itself to an âI can fix himâ mindset, because you only need to be right very occasionally.
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I donât wish to advocate for any aspiring young sports people or their coaches reading this to add a deliberate defect to their game⌠if youâre good enough you can shine through regardless, and while âmaybe I can fix himâ can lure stats people into tossing big money at wonky prospects, you would massively damage your chances in the vision of those whose focus is largely based on âEye testâ.
This, therefore, is not the only way to make it. Jacob Bethell made it into the England Menâs Cricket Team with mediocre stats, but the shape and technique looked too good to avoid. Instead, let this article resurface in your mind next time you think âwhy on earth did this team pay that for themââŚ