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Premiership Football: The Great British Rip-Off

Andy Greeves on over-priced players

Arsene Wenger's policy of buying young, foreign talent to build his Arsenal teams of the last decade has drawn a fair degree of criticism from various quarters of English football. A common concern is that Wenger and other overseas-spending managers, are diminishing the prospects of home-grown players making it as professionals. While the influx of overseas players has undoubtedly made it harder for English youngsters to break through into Premiership first-teams, Wenger and like can't be blamed for wanting to buy abroad.

Like the price of housing, transport and food in Britain, the cost of buying English is extortionate compared to the rest of the globe. The price tags English footballers command is as much to blame for the decreasing numbers of home-grown players in the Premiership as managers who splash their cash abroad. The hefty cost is damaging at grass roots level, preventing the movement of English players from the lower leagues. After all, why would a Premiership club buy a player from the lower leagues in England, when they can buy the equivalent talent cheaper from the top leagues in Europe.

Tottenham recently had a reported £14.5m bid for Middlesbrough's Stewart Downing rejected, highlighting just how out of control the prices for trading between Premiership clubs is. While Downing is undoubtedly a talented individual, his performances for his country have been disappointing overall. He's renowned as an excellent crosser of the ball yet he has produced just three assists for Middlesbrough this season. His scoring tally is also poor for someone that plays in an attacking position - just 17 goals in 164 Premiership games to date.

Boro's insistence that their player is worth in excess of £14.5m seems preposterous given the price that wingers across Europe far better than Downing are currently sold for. £10m was enough for Inter Milan to bring the Brazilian Amantino Mancini to the San Siro in July 2008. This is a player, at 27, in the peak of career with six years experience of playing in the Champions League. He has won the Copa America with Brazil and also plied his trade in three different leagues around the world.

Ricardo Quaresma, widely considered one of the best wingers in the world, cost around £15m last summer, also moving to Inter. Quaresma is a twice winner of Portuguese Footballer of the Year, in the same generation as the likes of Ronaldo and Luis Figo.

To continue the theme of wingers, foreign players in that position have consistently represented better value for money than their English counterparts. Morten Gamst Pedersen is an example that instantly springs to mind - having cost Blackburn a mere £2.5m in 2004 and going on to become one of the best left-sided players in the Premiership.

The hard working Steed Malbranque cost Fulham £4.5m in 2001, with the Frenchman going on to make 172 appearances for the club and score 32 goals. He was a consistent performer for Tottenham, who may well regret to selling to Sunderland last summer for £3.5m. He's gone on to make eight assists in twenty Premiership games, double the amount of Spurs regular left-midfielder this season, David Bentley, who cost an astronomical £15m from Blackburn.

Foreign players aren't necessarily better than English players, and there are frequent examples of foreign players who haven't been good enough to play in the Premiership. The advantage is simple - if you buy a foreigner for £3-4m say, if he doesn't prove a success, it's better than spending £15-20m on a non-performing Englishman. Tottenham's bid for Downing is unsurprising, given they have a history of paying above the odds for English players who haven't proven successful at White Hart Lane.

Darren Bent cost the Londoners £16.5m two summers ago. He's since looked anything but a £16.5m player, struggling to fit into Spurs playing system, in fact now he's struggling to get into the team. A goal scoring ratio of one strike in every three and a half games is hardly the kind of return Tottenham would have been expecting for their investment. Given David Bentley's poor form this season, he's under immense pressure to live up to his £15m fee too. Even given his talent, Tottenham's resigning of Jermain Defoe is yet another example of the club paying over the odds, given they sold him to Portsmouth for £9m just a year ago and bought him back twelve months later for £15.75m.

This trend of paying over the odds for English players isn't exclusive to Spurs. Striker David Kitson scored just 11 goals in two seasons in the Premiership with Reading. On the Royals relegation from the top flight, he moved to Stoke for £5.5m. He's played for 14 games for Stoke this season and hasn't yet scored. For the same price Cristiano Lucarelli was signed by Parma and has netted 11 times in Serie A so far this season. Speaking of goalless wonders, David Nugent cost Portsmouth £6m for Preston, but has yet to hit the net for Pompey in 18 league games. £6m would have been enough to buy two Roque Santa Cruz's in the same 2007 summer transfer window. The Paraguayan has fared rather better than Nugent, having scored 22 goals in 50 games for Blackburn Rovers.

Bargains between English teams are a thing of the past, but this isn't the case across Europe. Leighton Baines, a Wigan Athletic left-back never capped by England, cost Everton £6m in the same summer World Cup winning full-back Fabio Grosso was signed by Inter Milan for £4.3m. Another member of that Italy World Cup side, Luca Toni moved from Fiorentina to Bayern Munich for £8.5m in 2007, which is how much Nigel Reo-Coker cost Aston Villa, despite having under performed and been relegated with West Ham United the previous season.

The current weakness of the pound means that English clubs will have to pay more to sign players from abroad. But given the lack of value for money players in their own country already represent, it's unlikely to deter Premiership clubs from spending overseas.

Andy Greeves

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