No I'm sure our Chairman looked at his market value on a third party website and decided his price from there
If you seriously think the player values that site makes up hve any relevance to anything whatsoever, you need locking up.
Hat. I appreciate you weren't on the thread earlier, so won't have scrolled back to see the information. So I'll try to be brief and explain why you've misunderstood.
Each and every club hires consultants (for example Orb Finance) to carry out asset valuations. This is absolutely essential for every club in terms of capital value, profit and loss, but also whether the directors/managers are acting in accordance with their legal obligations. Much like the company people work for will value the computers they use. It's exactly the same concept.
Transfermarkt is just an information database. Of course Transfermarkt is not used for player valuations by your chairman or any chairman. However, the "asset valuations" are taken from rough data provided by the consultants. There are problems with it - they only use a limited number of variables almost certainly computer generated and often their information is several months out of date. By comparison, when a club purchases a player they will get full, detailed valuation carried out. Ask anyone you know who is involved in football players if you don't believe me. So the information on transfermarkt is a very rough idea of what clubs will have had carried out for each player. BUT, rough as it is, it's the only source that people without inside info have for how our players are considered in pure financial terms. Some information is better than no information, after all.
And this is borne out by the fact that so many players who are being allowed to leave while in contract with their club are sold pretty close to their asset valuation (transfermarkt's margin of error is rarely more than about 10%, so they obviously have good info). The relationship between asset valuation when a club doesn't want to sell a player still under contract is a little bit more guesswork, but it's usually between 1.5 and 3 times asset valuation where a player has 12months left on their contract (check up the price you paid for Snodgrass). If it's as much as 3 times that usually means the selling club is almost happy to let the player go for nothing by the summer. On longer contracts the price can be as much as 3.5 or 4 times asset valuation. However, the higher the value of the player, the more risk there is and the multiples come down. If you don't believe me, next time you see a transfer price which doesn't really make sense (probably for a club other than your own), check it against the asset valuation and the multiples listed above. It works.
So it is undoubtedly something of a guessing game based on only rough estimates and the parameters are quite broad. But as I say, it's much better than otherwise having no information at all other than the random figures fans pluck out for their players. Otherwise, you sit there and blindly believe spluttering Bruce every time. If you'd rather just listen to the PR that comes out of your club, fine. But don't expect to receive much patience from people wanting an objective POV and wanting to understand the financial process. After all, it's big business and in the professional era, it's very unlikely that any club will be offering anything other than on-market negotiating starting bids, acceptable to the selling club or not. Anything spouted by your own club in faux apoplexy is simply to appease fans.
Some people seem to think transfermarket is a football bible. I'm far from convinced it is. Who monitors it, or is it the football version of Wikipedia? I ask because I've tried to use it for work - contacting agents for programmes I've worked on - it's so ridiculously out of date and filled with incorrect information, it's useless. I learnt very quickly (and with a red face) that you cant take much on it to be accurate.
See above. Take it with a pinch of salt and you're right it can be quite out of date. It's best used with hindsight, but at least it gives you a starting point for assessing where a deal is likely to end up or whether a bid is fair.
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