My Summer Shortlists

In a bid to understand the transfer market a bit better, I've been preparing a Summer shortlist of players for the past two Summers. It's basically a list of players that I suspect might be undervalued in the transfer market for whatever reason. In Summer 2013 I came up with a list of 50 players, and this Summer (2014) I expanded this year's list to around 200 names.

I am keeping the names on this list private - it's for me to learn, not a stick for critics to hit me with :). That said, I will reveal names on my lists as and when they're involved in transfers.

Note that these shortlists are not just a list of the best players I have seen - that would be fairly easy to prepare, and would contain what is basically a list of the usual suspects. Of course, were money no object any club could simply create a wishlist and then pick off those targets. But speaking as a West Ham fan, and as someone interested in how clubs build up their squad without an unlimited bankroll, I'm far more interested in value than I am in who the best players are (although the two are obviously connected in some ways).

What is value in football terms? I don't think there's any easy answer to that. A player may be available for cheaper than what would be perceived as their market rate, but if the market rate is open to question then the notion of value is going to be different to everyone. There are also times where notions of value change according to other considerations - if you need a keeper before the season starts next week, then you're more willing to overlook value just to get a body into the squad in time. English football is currently awash with talk of even tighter quotas of homegrown players, so the notion of value to English clubs of English players is completely out of step with other countries. I'd like to write more on value in the future.

So value, to me, is a bit of a moving target, and that's what makes it so fascinating to look at. But I do think 'market value' can be a different beast to what I think of as value - what the market values may or may not be correct. And I think a lot of transfer strategy is simply looking at the meta of market value and working out where your edge is in terms of exploiting it. For example, I think Newcastle United have decided that the market meta is undervaluing the French market, so they've gambled heavily in that area over the past few seasons.

What do I expect to get out of these lists of mine? Well I'm trying to learn what works and what doesn't when evaluating a player. But I'm also learning just as much about how I react to watching the sport - some players were on my list because of a few touches I saw of theirs as a sub, and others were based on watching many games over a longer period. I'm almost as interested in what you can learn about a player in a short time, as I am in what you learn over a long period. It may be that the more you know, the more you get influenced by false indicators of their worth or of their ability.

Ultimately what I'm trying to do is to improve my 'eye' for a player, the mysterious art or craft that is at the centre of many of football's biggest success stories. I'm also interested in how that deviates from what analytics can tell us about players, because I think that might be where the biggest edges lie in seperating true value from the market rates.

I'll be posting loads about these lists of mine, and how I think the market works, elsewhere on the blog I hope.