Article from Rory Smith about TransferMarkt in the NYT
This is what the site was designed to do: provide a source of knowledge, a point of reference and, through its humming chat boards, a place for a community of like-minded (read: slightly nerdy) individuals to gather. But that is not what it is known for, not what has made it famous.
Trying to place a specific worth on an individual soccer player is like capturing the beauty of a sunrise. The sport’s frenzied trading business is, in the words of Thomas Lintz, Transfermarkt’s managing director, a “marketplace without many of the classical market factors.” A player might be priceless to one club and worthless to another. Values can soar or tumble based on a manager’s whim, a poor game or the emergence of a superior rival.
Still, for years, Transfermarkt has been trying to provide a guideline of roughly how much every individual player might cost, all the way from Messi to Mozambique, through what it calls its Market Values: an estimate of worth based on the work of thousands of volunteers and sifted by the site’s 80 staff members.
It is that single detail — what is, deep down, just a crowdsourced guess at a valuation — that has transformed Transfermarkt from a single point of light in soccer’s great digital constellation into something approaching a lodestar, that has turned it, inexorably, from a site designed to reflect the sport’s ever-bubbling transfer scene into one that, now, defines it.
Squad Values
