Cost per goal of English Premier League Strikers

This week’s post is inspired by a conversation I had regarding Fernando Torres. Until recently he was hailed as one of the greatest strikers ever to grace the English game, but is now being slated by many as an expensive flop who’s so far cost Chelsea £50 million per league goal. In my opinion, Torres is a great striker who I’m certain will prove himself again, even if injuries may have robbed him of a little sharpness, but the £50m per goal figure stuck in my head and made me wonder which strikers have proved to be the best value for money in recent years in terms of cost per goal scored?

To analyse this, we’d need accurate data on transfer fees for some of the best strikers in premiership history, adjusted for inflation and changes in the transfer market over time, along with their goal stats. Thankfully, in writing their excellent book “Pay As You Play: The True Price of Success in the Premier League Era”, Paul Tomkins, Graeme Riley and Gary Fulcher collected just this kind of information*, and Joel Clyne used some of the data to discuss Darren Bent’s £18m January transfer to Aston Villa in this journal post http://joelclyne.livejournal.com/734.html. For their book, Tomkins, Riley and Fulcher painstakingly researched the accurate transfer fee paid for every player since 1992 and converted them to modern prices using the ‘football inflation rate’ that came out of their Transfer Price Index.

Taking the figures from the table in Joel’s article, it is possible to calculate the cost per goal of the selection of players that he considered, and they are shown  in the table below:

Table showing real costs (in March 2010 prices, using Transfer Price Index figures), appearances and goals of a selection of premiership strikers

            

So the best ‘value for money’ (in terms of cost-per-goal) striker in premiership history from this list is Thierry Henry, at a cost of roughly £140,000 per goal scored. He’s some way clear of Van Nistelrooy in second place on £260,000 a goal, and Cristiano Ronaldo, on £295,000 a goal, with the others trailing further behind.

Thierry Henry: The best value for money striker signing in Premiership history?

In hindsight, this is probably not such a surprising table. Thierry Henry was famously bought relatively cheaply by Arsene Wenger as a winger, converted to a striker, and was then prolific in the great Arsenal teams that won trophies under Wenger. It’s interesting to note that his ‘real’ transfer value, in modern prices (from ‘Pay as You Play’), is higher than that Liverpool paid to sign Fernando Torres from Atletico Madrid though, and similar to the fees Manchester United paid for Cristiano Ronaldo and Ruud Van Nistelrooy.

Obviously we know that strikers are not judged on goals alone, particularly certain types of striker. Peter Crouch comes out bottom of the above table, yet he offers much more to a team than the goals that he scores. The other huge caveat with this analysis is that it only includes transfer fees, when a fuller analysis of the value of a striker would also take into account the wage cost of signing him. Players these days can move for relatively cheap fees if they are out of contract, or near the end of their contract, but these players tend to command higher than average salaries and this additional cost would need to be factored in. 


Finally, not all players are included in this table (as I only have the data for those in Joel's article), and those who are still playing are a little harshly treated as their cost per goal will fall with each goal they score until they are next transferred. That said, it’s interesting to see how some of the best strikers in Premiership history compare on the basic figures shown above, and the clear win for Thierry Henry even when his transfer fee is inflated to take account of changes in transfer fees over time.

As for Torres himself - until 2010 he was the fourth best in the table above, and would almost certainly have pushed his way into the top three with an average season (if he'd scored 14 goals), and possibly even second place with a great season (with 24 goals). The huge fee and lack of goals since his move to Chelsea will have moved him almost to the bottom of the table though, and it will take some time and a lot of goals to move back to the position shown above.

(* I’m currently reading this book, and so far I’d highly recommend it - it’s a great read for anyone interested in how money shapes English Premiership football. A fantastic amount of data and high quality analysis behind it too, the data I've used above (obtained via a third party)  is just a tiny tiny snippet.)