Ferdinand for £125m, Brolin for £70m and Keane for £66m: How much Leeds’ biggest transfers would cost today - The Athletic 28/3/22
By Phil Hay
This article is part of a series looking at how historic
transfer fees would look today. The modern-day values have been compiled using
a system devised by Kieran Maguire and Jason Laws that adjusts the fees for
increases in football inflation, based on revenue increases over time. You can
read the full series here.
With Tomas Brolin, the extraordinary thing was the impact of
the car crash: from a £4.5 million transfer to Leeds United to retirement in
less than three years. It was and is a mystery. Why was the signing of Brolin
such a disaster? And was it always doomed to fail for him at Elland Road?
Brolin, latterly, has laid the blame at the door of Howard
Wilkinson and George Graham — managers, he says, who played him in the wrong
position or treated him with disdain. Wilkinson’s attitude towards Brolin was
that he would “rather have anyone in any position in my team who wanted to do
well for Leeds United than someone who didn’t”. It all went sour as quickly the
ink dried on the Swede’s contract.
Is Brolin the worst signing in Leeds’ history? Financially,
there are few deals which look more horrendous. Analysis done by The Athletic,
using a calculator designed to adjust fees on the basis of inflation in
football over the past 30 years, shows that in this era, Brolin would have cost
the club just over £70 million. In return, they got 17 starts, four goals, and
a considerable headache.
But to properly gauge where he sits in the league table of
recruitment at Leeds, it was necessary to run the same data comparison on other
transfers completed by the club. The Athletic’s inflation calculator has been
created by finance expert Kieran Maguire and Jason Laws, his colleague at the
University of Liverpool; a metric that converts historical fees into the
equivalent cost today. The numbers are based on 2019 finances to stop the
temporary impact of COVID-19 on the transfer market during the past two years
distorting results.
By looking at the three most expensive deals in every season since the creation of the Premier League in 1992, it is possible to create an accurate picture of where Leeds hit the bullseye, where their aim strayed slightly and where they missed the board completely. The calculator lays bare the quality of the club’s recruitment through the Wilkinson era, the boom and bust days of Peter Ridsdale and the meandering years in the EFL when investment in players dropped dramatically.
History records Robbie Fowler and Seth Johnson as the
arrivals that broke the camel’s back at Elland Road, driving Leeds’ debts
beyond control in 2001. At the time they cost a combined £18 million, equating
to a combined cost of £99.5 million now. Even compared to someone like Lee
Sharpe, a £67-million recruit in modern-day terms, Fowler and Johnson were the
worst of the excesses — a huge outlay that achieved nothing of note. It was
Ridsdale’s last throw of the dice.
Naturally, there were some very astute investments, too.
Nigel Martyn, one of England’s outstanding goalkeepers, looks a snip at £2.25
million, inflated to £33.3 million, as does Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink for £2.2
million from Boavista in 1997 (adjusted to £22.5 million in 2019). Lee Bowyer,
bought from Charlton for just over £40 million in 2019 money, proved excellent
value and appreciated rapidly. David Batty, the equivalent of £42 million in
1998, was money well spent and Lucas Radebe, all-in with South African
compatriot Phil Masinga, would be a £5 million deal in the current market — a
veritable bargain.
Prior to Ferdinand arriving from West Ham United, one of
Leeds’ most comparatively costly transfers of the Premier League era was Brian
Deane, with his £2.9-million fee in 1993 representing £73 million now. In the
earliest years of the competition, goals were what attracted the big money.
Newcastle went after Les Ferdinand and Liverpool paid out for Stan Collymore.
Every club wanted a prolific centre-forward. Deane’s reputation was built on
fluent finishing for Sheffield United.
Where Leeds found good value, however, was in the lean years
outside the Premier League. There were countless transfers in those 16 seasons
that failed to deliver much, but they succeeded in acquiring some gems for a
very modest outlay. Between Nick Barmby in 2002 and Luke Murphy in 2013, Leeds
spent £1 million or more on only three footballers. Meanwhile, Luciano Becchio,
Jermaine Beckford and Robert Snodgrass — three of their shining lights in
League One — were acquired for what would still be six-figure sums today. The
£200,000 paid to Bristol City for Luke Ayling in 2016 has barely risen at all
and the incomparable Pablo Hernandez comes in at under £1 million using the
inflation calculator. Hernandez’s influence on the reign of Marcelo Bielsa was
as good as priceless.
There were also occasions where Leeds did well with resale
value. Ross McCormack came in from Cardiff City for the equivalent of £800,000
and left for Fulham four years later for what would now amount to £24 million.
Ferdinand’s sale to Manchester United in 2002 would have raised in the region
of £140 million today, a price that tallies with the reputation of one of the
best English defenders of his generation. The problem for Leeds was that both
sales were distressed, or done at a time when the club were in a downward
spiral. Neither fee, despite the scale of the income, had any positive effect
on the seasons that followed.
So often, football finance has little logic behind it.
Brolin’s fee amounts to 70 Liam Coopers or 35 Stuart Dallases. Cooper and
Dallas were good fits rather than high cost, and better because of it. Some of
Leeds’ most valuable assets since 1992 — Harry Kewell, Jonathan Woodgate and
Kalvin Phillips for example — were generated by their academy and commanded no
transfer fees. The lesson is much the same as it always was: that spending big
and spending well are separate things altogether. At Elland Road, it has not
lost its relevance.
