Player Valuation
A player is said to be worth €40m. How much of that number is judgement, and how much is arithmetic on a birth certificate?
Market values frame every transfer conversation in football. They appear in scouting shortlists, in "value for money" analysis, and are used daily as a proxy for how good a player is.
There is no public evidence about whether they carry that information. This benchmark produces it.
This benchmark is in draft and is not scoring yet. The protocol is published before any score exists, so that it cannot be changed to suit a result.
What a valuation claims
A market value is a price forecast, not a performance forecast, and the difference decides how it can be scored honestly. A price is roughly
quality × (age, contract length, position scarcity, league, club wealth, hype)
Everything in that second bracket is free. Age comes off a birth certificate, position and league off a squad list. None of it requires scouting, judgement, or a model.
Only the first term is a claim about the player.
Why it is not scored against performance directly
The obvious benchmark would score valuations against realised performance. It does not survive the first objection, and the objection is correct: a market value is not a performance forecast, so of course a model built from performance beats it at predicting performance.
A baseline using last season's output would win by construction, and the result would mean nothing. A benchmark whose whole proposition is honest measurement cannot publish a comparison like that.
The test that survives
Hold everything that is not quality fixed, and see whether the price still knows anything.
Two central midfielders. Both 24. Both in the same league. One valued at €40m, one at €8m. Over the months that follow, does the €40m player actually perform better?
Repeated across every such pair, that is the whole measurement. Within a pair the only thing that differs is what the market says a player is worth, so any ordering that survives has to come from the quality term. There is nothing else left for it to come from.
Two boards, never blended
| Board | Asks | Zero means |
|---|---|---|
| Signal beyond demographics | Does the value order players by what they then do, once age, position and league are fixed? | No information beyond demographics |
| Fee prediction | Does the value predict the price paid, at 12, 6, 3 and 1 months before a transfer? | The revaluation added nothing to the value it replaced |
They have different baselines, so they have different zeros, and two zeros cannot be added into one number without inventing a weighting nobody can defend. Both are published; neither is combined with the other.
Full detail is in Scoring.
What the result would mean, either way
- Values carry signal past demographics. The first public evidence that football's most quoted number reflects genuine judgement.
- They do not. Most of a market value is age-and-league arithmetic, and a widespread industry practice rests on something with no quality content.
Neither result depends on anyone losing, which is what makes this a benchmark rather than an attack.
What this does not claim
It does not claim market values are wrong. It claims they are unmeasured, and proposes one measurement of one thing they are widely assumed to contain.
Nor is it a transfer-price model. Fee accuracy is one board of two, measured on a population that is not random — players who move are not a random sample of players who are valued — and that limit is published with the score rather than left for a reader to discover.
Taking part
A participant sends one value per player per month, for the players it chooses to cover. No model, no methodology disclosure, no endpoint to keep running. See the Submission contract.