Soccer Players Transfer Values vs. Inflation
Transfermarkt · Player values · Inflation · 2005–2025
Football market values through the lens of inflation
From Neymar’s record move to Paris Saint-Germain to the changing value of the game’s biggest names, this project puts football’s numbers in an inflation-adjusted perspective.
Photo via Unsplash
The question behind the project
As most kids and teenagers did in 2017, I was scrolling on Instagram looking at a bunch of different soccer/sports pages. Many of those pages would talk about Transfermarkt prices for soccer players. On August 3rd, I saw Neymar was sold to PSG for € 222 million. At this time, that was a world record transfer and was pretty crazy to the soccer community. The highest transfer price before that was less than half, at € 105 million. Because of that, I started to wonder how the prices have changed over time for transfer values relative to the prices of everything in the world/the Consumer Price Index. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of goods and services, and it is the most widely used indicator of inflation in the United States. In simpler terms, it can also be how much a certain amount of money today could buy you in the years prior. Since 2005, the U.S. CPI has risen from about 195.3 in 2005 to 334.1 in August 2026, reflecting an overall increase of roughly 71% in price. I wanted to make a project with images and data sets to help show other people this relation.
Transfermarkt is a soccer data website that tracks players, clubs, transfers, and estimated market values. The table below uses Transfermarkt data to show the 5 players with the highest estimated market values for each selected year.
PCE is the annual average of monthly Personal Consumption Expenditures price-index values (2017 = 100), from BEA via FRED (series PCEPI).
About Me
- Name: Jonas Noury
- Email: J.noury30@ncf.edu
- GitHub: JonasNoury9
- Final project repository: transfervalues
- College: New College of Florida
About This Project
This project compares yearly averages of the highest Transfermarkt player market values with inflation measures from 2005 through 2025. It includes World Bank CPI observations from multiple countries and the U.S. Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index.