Manchester United: Paul Pogba madness not so mad at all

Manchester United’s pursuit of Paul Pogba could be considered the very definition of madness, but when you dig into history, it may not be so mad at all.

The past two years have seen football reach new levels of madness. It begs the question, has football gone mad? Owners are now paying over €100m as a standard fee for a world class player. Just look at Manchester United and Paul Pogba. In the meantime newly promoted top flight teams have the financial power to turn down £30m bids for their players.

Would this have happened 10 years ago? No. However we are blinded by these astronomical sums. When we take a step back and look at these transfers from another angle, an angle which shows the transfers in terms of a clubs financial power, we see that these transfers are nothing new.

On the brink of a summer move back to the Manchester United, Paul Pogba could be leaving Turin for over €120m, after impressing for both Juventus and France, Manchester United could be paying a high premium for a player that left for just £800,000 compensation in 2012.

Pogba has it all, he bosses the midfield, he can tackle, he can shoot and he can defend all at the highest level but is he worth €120m? Perhaps not. Is he worth 20% of Manchester United’s annual revenue? Almost certainly.

To put this into perspective we need to take a trip Italy, specifically Parma, the home of prosciutto di Parma, Parmesan cheese and in 2001, a 23 year old Gianluigi Buffon. Voted Serie A ‘goalkeeper of the year’ after helping Parma reach fourth place in the league and the Coppa Italia final, narrowly missing out on the trophy in a 2-1 loss to Fiorentina on aggregate, he attracted the attention of Italian giants Juventus who were keen to make a mark after missing out on the Scudetto and losing talisman Zinedine Zidane to Real Madrid.

Gianluigi Buffon during Serie A match played between Parma and Juventus at Ennio Tardini stadium on January 9, 2000 in Parma, Italy /

Juventus paid a fee which is still unheard of for a goalkeeper, especially one so young and inexperienced. €53m was spent on Gianluigi Buffon, which in hindsight went down as one of the bargains of the century, however at the time it was a huge risk.

Just how big was this risk? Rather than looking at transfers in terms of monetary value, the way fees are usually reported, we are going to look at these transfers in terms of percentages of the annual turnover of a club to grasp just how big these fees were in terms of both ‘real inflation’ and ‘football inflation’.

The Deloitte Football Money League states that in 2001 Juventus had an annual revenue of €173.50m, meaning that Juventus spent 30.5% of their revenue on Buffon. Buffon wasn’t the only player to make a big money move to the Turin based club that summer.

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After selling Zidane to Real Madrid for €75m, Juventus had a lot of money to spend and holes in their squad to fill in order to secure their 28^th Scudetto. The answers to these holes were Pavel Nedvěd, moving from Lazio for €41.20m and Lilian Thuram from Parma for €41.50m represented 23.75% and 23.92% of the total revenue respectively.

Real Madrid spent 54.03% of their total yearly revenue on Zinedine Zidane in 2001 after buying him for €75m in the Galácticos era of Florentino Pérez’s reign as president of Madrid. Zidane would go on to play over 155 games for Madrid, scoring the winner in the Champions League final and later returning as a manager to win the Champions League in his first season.

With these fees flying around, it was no wonder the late 90’s/early 2000’s Serie A was such a powerhouse. Three years before his iconic move to Chelsea, Argentinian Hernan Crespo saw himself on the end of a world record fee.

Lazio narrowly won the league in the 1999/2000 season and needed a marque signing, somebody who would bag them 20+ goals a season in the most defensively strong league in the world, a striker like that would cost you somewhere around €56.50m. In other words, 45.06% of your annual revenue.

22 Apr 2001: Hernan Crespo of Lazio in action during the Serie A 27th Round League match between Lazio and Vicenza played at the Olympic Stadium Rome. DIGITAL CAMERA Mandatory Credit: Grazia Neri/ALLSPORT /

We’re beginning to see the big picture here, perhaps it isn’t the price of the players we need to be focusing on, but the percentage of revenue. There are many reasons for this, one being the fact that looking back, you can’t take into account the effect inflation has on these transfers.

We’ll quickly work out how much Buffon’s 2001 transfer would cost Juventus in 2016:

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Converting €53m using to GBP at the time of the transfer would mean that Juventus payed £41.8m for the iconic goalkeeper. However in today’s terms that would mean that Juventus would have to pay Parma £62,360,684.51 for his services. That’s roughly 2.26 Marouane Fellaini’s.

The most used example of ‘football going mad’ in the past year is Everton’s £50m price tag of John Stones, whom to the average fan, is just a young, talented defender who can place a pass. Seen as overpriced by many, perhaps because he is English due to the ‘English Tax’ on players due to the home-grown enforced by the FA and lack of legitimate talent. Perhaps it’s because of the selling power of other Premier League teams, driving up the prices for inter-league transfers. Despite all of this, two of the top coaches in the world, Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho are still fighting to land his signature but what team would be mad enough to spend £50m on a young, unproven English centre back?

Unsurprisingly, we’re heading back in time to Manchester United in 2002. For the first time in Sir Alex Ferguson’s reign at Manchester United, they’ve fallen out of the top two, being bested by their closest rivals Liverpool and Arsenal.

Goals were not an issue for Manchester United, scoring 87 goals over the course of the season, a joint highest goal tally since the legendary Scot’s arrival. However, Manchester United conceded 45 goals in 38 games, joint lowest since he joined, having only let in so many goals in during the 99/2000 season.

Manchester United turned to a young centre-back in the form of Rio Ferdinand, who was captaining a side 45 miles away in Leeds who had just finished fifth in the league, missing out on fourth place to Newcastle by five points which subsequently sent the club into financial turmoil, a hole they’ve still not dug themselves out of. This meant that they had to offload players and their captain was number one on that list.

Rio Ferdinand made his move to Manchester United that summer for a sum of £36.1m which is £52,973,672.85 in today’s terms when accounting for inflation. That sum sounds familiar doesn’t it? However as we discussed earlier, the best way to describe a transfer is by annual revenue.

Rio Ferdinand of Manchester United and Wayne Rooney with the FA Barclays Premier League trophy after winning the league season 2007-2008 (Photo by AMA/Corbis via Getty Images) /

In 2002, Manchester United had an annual revenue of £229.5m meaning that Rio Ferdinand cost 19.74% of their revenue for that year.