Football Transfer Record

The Football Transfer Window is about to shut (where 'football' = 'soccer' and 'the transfer window' is the period during which players may move from one football club to another, subject to certain conditions, the chief one involving vast sums of money).

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!]