With the news that Philippe Coutinho will be going to Barcelona for a transfer fee of £142M (and Virgil van Dijk for £75M last week), and with the constant refrain we hear about a player “not being worth it”, or someone being “overpriced”, we took a few minutes to re-read some of the reporting on a sport we grew up with, baseball. We were just a kid through the era of early free agency, and we matured (or, at least, we think we did) during an age of collusion and eventual and ostensible market “freedom” for the players. It’s interesting – the big contracts handed out to top players at any given time (materially different, in almost every way, from transfer the fees transacted between ownership groups) nonetheless do give us some patterning, some sense of the inexplicable and inevitable rise of established (or near-established) talent acquisition costs. And the reactions are similar.
From the Guardian, 2.5 years ago:
“Louis van Gaal has called the projected £58.8m committed by Manchester United to the signing of Anthony Martial “ridiculous”, with the valuation evidence of the “crazy world we are in.”
And, 16 years ago, from 1991, Steve Fainaru’s story in the Boston Globe (subtly titled “The Real Green Monster – Buy Me Some Peanuts and Roger Clemens”, sub-headed “With Revenues, Salaries, and Expansion Fees Spiraling Out of Control. Baseball is Evolving from a Pastime to a Product”:
Increasingly, and distressingly, baseball is beginning to mirror society’s problems instead of providing a haven from them.
and
Most management people believe the game cannot sustain its economic system much longer. “At some point the players are going to keep going to the well, and it’s going to be dry,” says Chicago’s [Ron] Schueler.
We won’t comment on burdening sports as the manifestation of larger existential issues facing civilization, and Fainaru’s statement is clearly more dire, but we do see the familiarity of the exaggeration and disbelief, repeated by management (and by fans and cranky sportswriters, frankly) every time a new contract breaks the bank, every time money changes hands at extreme levels.
I am guessing this story will be written again later this month, and then this summer, and then again next summer, and…
-ab