Why does the Transfer Window close at 11pm? There might be all sorts of reasons but I
suspect this is because it will be midnight in continental/central Europe.
The BBC Sport website has a nice article about the way
the record for the highest transfer has changed over time.
They then use a fairly rubbish graph to display the data!
The original is in the article, but here is a copy. What is wrong with it?
There are lots of things worthy of comment:
·
At a glance it appears to be exponential. The y-axis helps to show this.
·
The y-axis is useless, though, if you are
particularly interested in the left-hand half of the graph. The first 11 data points all appear to be of
identical height - despite increasing from £1000 to half a million.
·
The x-axis isn’t used properly, with huge gaps
between some of the dates and small ones at other times.
·
Inflation hasn’t been considered. I used thisismoney.co.uk to check out what Alf Common’s £1000 fee would be equivalent to in today’s
money. It is £100,000. [Which means that Gareth Bale could buy an
Alf Commons every 56 hours or so.]
·
Currency conversion needs to be considered. Bale cost €100million, which currently equates
to about £86million, but in the future this will change. When compiling a league table of big
transfers, which currency should be considered?
·
There is some missing data. Amusingly, the Daily Mail version of thisarticle includes screenshots from Wikipedia. If we accept the Wiki figures we can see that there are some other record amounts that haven’t been
included. Why not? [This also gives the
intriguing fact that at one stage the world’s most expensive player was owned
by Falkirk!]
