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Focus on Player Recruitment
Prozone’s Performance Analysis Centre takes a look at some recent trends in the European transfer market.
The latest Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance confirmed that the 2007/08 season lived up to expectations in terms of record wages and transfer spending in the FA Premier League. Gross transfer spending across the 92 top professional clubs in the UK grew to £779 million in 2007/08 (up 35% from 2006/07) and indications suggest that the rate of growth will continue as players, agents and fans continue to pressurise clubs to spend more of their revenue on their squad.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority is spent by FA Premier League clubs and in November 2009 the FA Premier League has revealed the amount paid to agents by their member clubs for the first time ever. The final figure was a staggering £70.6 million from October 2008 to September 2009. Player trading has become big business in football and, alongside player spend, clubs are also continuing to invest in their scouting processes in an attempt to more accurately and objectively measure the potential of new players. This is being manifested in many ways, including the use of objective data, analysis and video to supplement the intuition and expertise of scouts and managers. In the last 12 months, Prozone alone have provided over 50 Player Recruitment requests to our clients.
European focus
Further analysis reveals that, although only 34% of players bought over the last 3 seasons were British, a high proportion of intra-league transfers still occur with £160 million (24% of all transfer revenues) being paid to other FA Premier League clubs. The Championship was the second highest supplier of players to FA Premier League clubs with 97 players between 2006 and 2009. However, the majority of FA Premier League clubs’ transfer spending is with overseas clubs with £351 million spent in 2007/08 (2006/07: £275m). Within Europe, the French, Spanish, Italian and German leagues provided the FA Premier League with the most new players.
Expatriate player analysis
The big-5 leagues in Europe accounted for over 52% of all players transferred into the FA Premier League over the last 3 seasons – and the number is rising…
Latin American trend
FA Premier League clubs are increasingly looking towards Latin America for new talent. This follows a trend evident in Spain and Italy where nearly 50% of all ‘expatriate’ players recently recruited were from South America. There has been an 8.9% increase in the number of players recruited from South American divisions into the FA Premier League over the last 4 years.
New for 2010
100% Coverage of the core league in;
Latin America
- - Argentina
- - Brazil
- - Chile
- - Columbia
- - Mexico
Europe
- - England
- - France
- - Italy
- - Germany
- - Spain
With European clubs making around 10 signings each during the season, January will see another busy month for player trading and we look forward to supporting all our clients with objective performance data and video analysis.
Contact us for further information about our brand new online recruitment product.
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