When Riyad Mahrez moved from Ligue 2 club Le Havre to Leicester City in January 2014, the transfer barely caused a ripple on the pond of the football landscape. On the same day as Mahrez completed his £375,000 move to Leicester, who were then leading the Championship, Aiden McGeady grabbed most of the headlines by joining Everton from Spartak Moscow for £1.5m. In February Gary Lineker revealed that Leicester’s chief scout, Steve Walsh, came across the player as if by accident: “I know when he found Mahrez he was looking at someone else and came back with Mahrez.”

In the space of two years, Mahrez’s value has multiplied over and over on the back of performances that have catapulted Leicester to the top of the Premier League, while McGeady is currently on loan at Sheffield Wednesday. As Mahrez’s star has risen, it has become clear that Leicester secured a bargain the day they bought him. Raheem Sterling moved to Manchester City last summer for £49m – enough money to buy Mahrez 130 times over. That is quite an exchange rate. Such an extraordinary disparity between a player who has scored 16 goals and provided 11 assists in this season’s Premier League compared to one who has six league goals and a couple of assists poses the question of exactly how players are valued.

With companies offering more and more data analysis, there should be more science behind this fundamental aspect of managing a football club. Naturally the price of a player is ultimately down to what clubs are willing to pay. As Phil Smith, a football agent who has represented Gianfranco Zola, Andrey Arshavin and Harry Kane, points out: “It is a question of supply and demand, with the agents having little overall influence. The greater the competition, the higher the price.” Agents will encourage as much interest as possible in the hope of driving up their players’ worth, and consequently their fee, but there is only so much they can do.

Omar Chaudhuri, head of football intelligence at the 21st Club consultancy, who have worked with clubs in the Premier League and throughout the world, says buying players is a two-part procedure. The club identify exactly what type of player they need and then follow a process of due diligence as they look at typically just three or four players who fit their requirements. Chaudhuri points out that “it is a highly unusual labour market, especially at the top end, with only a few buyers realistically in the position to mount a serious bid for the likes of Lionel Messi or Neymar.” There are more players available lower down the leagues, but there are also more clubs in the hunt.

“One of the most important factors is the players’ age, with most peaking around 25,” says Chaudhuri. “Consequently their value will generally decrease as they reach their mid-20s.” The difficulty of comparing performances in different leagues is addressed by consultancies such as 21st Club, who have created a European super league that ranks every club involved in European competition. This helps buying clubs judge the relative strength of the player’s performances and is used alongside other measures such as international experience, fitness levels and even disciplinary records.

Although the availability of data has grown exponentially in the last 20 years, the process of valuing a player remains a combination of hard and soft data. Statistics are used alongside the insight of the manager and his coaching staff. The value of a player will vary according to the buying club’s circumstances. Chaudhuri quotes the example of John Stones, who was subject of a flurry of interest from Chelsea last summer because of their pressing need to find a homegrown centre-back to succeed John Terry. Stones was less valuable to other clubs, such as Liverpool and Manchester United, because they have more homegrown players.

The widely held perception is that English players are over-valued. Even though the Premier League is increasingly global in its appeal to audiences and players, the stipulation that eight of any club’s 25-man first-team squad must have spent at least three years at an English or Welsh academy before their 21st birthday adds an artificial hike to the cost of those players. Sterling’s £49m move to Manchester City was cited as an example of this price inflation, although Smith suggests that English players are expensive because “the best players in the world do not want to play here and very few English players are in demand abroad.”

Raheem Sterling poses with a Manchester City scarf after joining the club in July 2015. Photograph: Andrew Yates/Reuters

Southampton are often praised for their flourishing academy, which has produced players such as Luke Shaw, James Ward-Prowse and Matt Targett in recent years. But even more impressive than this talent is the considerable achievement of their succession planning, with their “black box” providing a wealth of data that is analysed to facilitate the next transfer targets.

Southampton’s black box is the club’s inner sanctum of recruitment – a specifically designed suite where the management team can view a vast range of information gathered on players, teams and even managers. Their targets must suit the philosophy of the club and be able to fit what they call “the Southampton way”.

Their former head of recruitment, Paul Mitchell, outlined what Southampton look for when scouting player in an interview in 2014: “He has to be athletic, he has to be able to move and engage with the environment and engage with the information that Southampton give them to make them successful in their careers.” This selectiveness limits the field of prospective signings but it helps ensure a smoother transition for the players who arrive at the club as they fit the system more naturally, having already satisfied the strict criteria set by the club.

Ross Wilson, the 34-year-old director of scouting and recruitment at Southampton, expands on the changes in the mixture of hard data and soft skills in the last decade: “There has been a massive shift in that balance with so much more information readily available, whether that is scouting reports, statistics, than there has ever been before.”

Despite this deluge of information, Wilson says the key to their success is simplicity. “We try to not overly complicate recruitment. Let’s just organise the structure so that we can take all the information available into the melting pot and then we can make the right decision. We have a comprehensive scouting structure on the ground, a really good network of people in the key countries and exceptional staff here in our training ground at Staplewood and so they all feed in the information, which we can then use to make the best decisions.”



Wilson also stresses the importance of teamwork among the various roles at the club. “Everything we do is about totally understanding the marketplace, working to a structure, working on our organisation, working that process and that’s where all our key people get involved from our scouts on the ground, our recruitment staff in the office, myself, Les Reed [head of football development], Ronald Koeman. Everybody is working together to achieve the same aim.



“The black box is absolutely integral to what we do inside the club in both scouting/ recruitment and analysis. The black box is constantly changing, so what it was 18 months ago is completely different to what it is now. We encourage creativity in the club. We are constantly asking our people to come up with ideas to create a new way of thinking and the black box is right at the heart of that. We want to be at the forefront of recruitment and remain there.



“We genuinely believe in our way of working. The Southampton way has been embedded in the club for a number of years through Les Reed and the board. We stay consistent to our model, but we are mindful to ensure that we are constantly evolving and reviewing what we do to ensure that, although our way of working doesn’t change, the details certainly do. We have a strategy and we have a model and we stick to it, we don’t flip-flop all over the place and change our strategy from window to window.”



Southampton do not compete with richer clubs for prize assets who might not even be suitable for their own carefully developed style and structure. Quite often the players they identify as potential targets will not be on the radar of the larger clubs so there is no need to try to outmuscle wealthier competitors.

So if another Mahrez were to become available, he would probably end up at a Southampton or Leicester, passing by the bigger clubs who are focusing on marquee signings and buying the next Sterling. Consequently, clubs will continue to offer different valuations on players, allowing smaller clubs to extract better value from the transfer market and outperform their bigger, wealthier rivals.

• This article is from The Agony and the Ecstasy

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