Enough is enough - we need fair market value for players NOW

Analysis

Paul Macdonald | Brand Owner

Like an evening at a casino, the morning after the Premier League deadline day before feels like a fever dream of money being thrown around with abandon.

In 2025, £396m was spent on the final day at the end of the most torrid, wild, seismic summer of spending football had ever seen. This summer: hold my beer.

Over £500m burned, and for what? It’s egregious, it’s stupid, it confounds the concept of value or of any kind of semblance of reality. The roulette wheel spins across the 20 boardrooms, the random player generator lands on a target and, subsequently, a random number is assigned to that player. It’s detached from reality and is built into the rules; this is Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) for dummies, and only the blind can’t see the blatant balance sheet gerrymandering taking place here.

As with any period of largesse, the people responsible for it have no idea that they’re in it. Like the Dot Com Bubble, the 2008 Financial Crisis, even Serie A in the 90s, it’s keeping up with the Joneses with additional net book value calculations.

Most expensive Premier League deals this summer 👇 pic.twitter.com/c14IgLlHtv

— Football Transfers (@Transfersdotcom) September 1, 2026

It’s got to end somewhere, but as always the people doing it are the last people who should be asked to curtail it. ‘If we don’t spend it, someone else will’ has echoes of the current AI overinflation in the race for… something. Resolute, robust regulation has to come from elsewhere, and it’s pretty obvious where it should come from the establishing of a fair market value for players.

That this doesn’t already exist outside platforms like FootballTransfers, who attempt to value a player based on old-fashioned ideas of talent potential and achievement, is quite the thing. No-one seems to know the value of anything any more, and transfers are the Icarus of this example, burning through the wings of TV deals and rampant commercialisation (and, largely, private credit) in the search for, maybe, Conference League football.

Current ETV

Elliot Anderson

M, DM (C)

Man City

Elliot Anderson

M, DM (C)

Man City

€69.4M

ETV Range

€52M - €86.7M

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FIFA and UEFA have long since debated a standardised metric to value players, one which incorporates player performance, contract length and other variables into the system. But it is, as yet, still to see the light of day. This is what the free market does when very silly, underqualified people have access to spurious wealth. The Premier League is the net result.

So in order to restore balance to the system, a centralised measurement of value has to be reached. It has to be grounded in fact, not based on what a team thinks another will pay and then subsequently paying it.

Just look at the world around us. Bond markets are in shock, interest rates are on the rise. There’s ripples of crisis crippling western economies. Everywhere you look, things are being squeezed. And at the same time we have the Premier League out here sparking champagne for spending £400m in a single window on players which might make them marginally better. The abuse of analytics in this way, which were designed to build functioning teams, has to be seen for what it is; understood so badly Donald Trump would stand more chance of understanding it.

Current ETV

Enzo Fernández

M, DM (C)

Man City

Enzo Fernández

M, DM (C)

Man City

€83.3M

ETV Range

€75M - €91.7M

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And what reward does the rest of Europe have for trying to be modestly fiscally responsible? They are also forced to operate in this same rigged system where values increase so exponentially that they can barely compete with teams who will occupy the relegation positions in the league at the end of the season.

It has to stop somewhere and half-baked measures like Squad Cost Ratio are not the answer. This has to be defined from an independent source to at least proffer something close to the market realities of trading. It has to be robust and stand up to scrutiny, it must be adhered to, and it simply must work.

The Premier League might have loads of money on paper, but that’s not what this window is. It is a descent into the depths of cowboy capitalism which could impact teams for generations to come should the world around it continue to contract.

It’s the canary in the coal mine, it should be the wake-up call that change must come. I’m not holding my breath.