With Neymar’s transfer to PSG, the football media has moved from just excitable to the swooning and fainting associated with young Victorian debutantes laying eyes on returning officers of the Household Cavalry. The “world record” (we will get to this in a moment) has seen the football experts go into overdrive in trying to explain how it is that so much has been paid, and how it can be justified.

Among the more interesting commentators were the crew on last week’s Guardian Football podcast, specifically award-winning Jonathan Wilson who made a couple of insightful points. The first was the likening of the football transfer market not to the clichéd and overused Dutch tulipmania of the 17^th century, but to a more subtle historical event that I had not heard of before, the Indian horse market of the same period. Although Wilson does not spell it out, the point here is not that best-in-class assets become expensive (Neymar for €222m is comprehensible); it is rather what Mourinho has been warning about, that mediocre asset prices get dragged up too and that is where things become unsustainable. In other words, the Man Utd’s of this world will always spend top dollar; the real danger is when Middlesbrough are doing the same.

The second intriguing point surrounds the role of Qatar in the Neymar move. Barcelona have for many years irritated a majority of neutral fans with their holier-than-thou attitude about all matters football. It does not take a hard-core royalist like myself to be sickened by the constant nonsense about being “mes que un club”, or the self-indulgent refusal to have a shirt sponsor for so many years. But recently, the club have taken to criticizing Qatar over the forthcoming World Cup – the very people they finally took their blood money from when the caved into for money. Was this criticism a result of failing to agree a new sponsorship deal? Was PSG’s bid for Neymar driven by a Qatari government keen to demonstrate they still had retaliatory power? Both, it seems, may be a firm “yes”. Well, it couldn’t have happened to nicer people …

But really, how big a transfer fee is Neymar, anyway? Clearly a direct comparison of nominal fees is useless; so is a basic use of inflation to recalculate them. Only one analysis I have seen attempts to bring fees into historical perspective, the excellent Paul Tomkins’ blog. For the purposes of analyzing which transfers have had what impact, Tomkins and his team have used a form of “football inflation” based on average transfer prices from year to year, and inflating the nominal figures this way. Since football inflation has far outstripped CPI, this produces a top ten looking something like this:

Source: https://tomkinstimes.com/2017/07/shock-transfers-now-cost-more-plus-top-100-signings-after-inflation/

Now, I like this approach. It has much to recommend it. However I believe it understates the impact of TV money on the psyche of football clubs – Tomkins’ analysis looks at correlation between the two but does not integrate them. I believe that – for the Premier League at least – another interesting way of looking at transfer prices is rebasing nominal transfer fees against the growth in TV deals. In my model, “inflation” is based entirely on the growth of TV deals struck over time (which have grown at an impressive 17.2% CAGR since 1992). In particular, I think this better reflects the thinking behind those headline-grabbing, record transfer deals as opposed to the median ones. The thesis being, that record transfers experience inflation different to normal transfers.

When this principle is applied – the Pang Index – the following numbers are generated:

Transfer records re-based to Premier League TV deal sizes

The blue bars represent record transfer fees paid by English clubs since the Premier League came into effect in today’s money. The grey bars were record transfers out of England (as it happens, all to Real Madrid). In this context, I have thrown in the Neymar transfer for fun. Of course this is not a perfect comparison – European clubs have very different TV deal structures and have not earned as much as English clubs have anyway; moreover the likes of PSG are barely “commercial” clubs at all these days, throwing the numbers out. Nonetheless, it makes some sense: Neymar’s fee is probably the same as a proportion of the kinds of TV money sloshing around as Veron’s transfer to Man Utd was all those years ago. No-one old enough to remember, can really be in doubt that Shearer’s £15m fee shocked us rather more than Neymar’s (let’s perhaps forget Stan Collymore for a moment).

The basic lesson is: money is here to stay; it is growing at a pace; but it makes surprises more and more difficult. Already this summer, there have been several moves rumoured to be in the same ballpark (£131m for a 31-year old Ronaldo, for instance). Actually, for the bigger clubs, it seems superstars are getting cheaper, not more expensive.