Issue 1 - The Markets Are Open

They say that goals are the most important currency in football, but what currency are they actually worth and how much value do they actually hold? Questions that may have been asked in the past but has anybody ever really come up with the answer?

That ladies and gentlemen is where The Goal Markets finds itself lurking between the posts and although all goals are considered equal, that parity may not actually prove to be the case.

Why? Well what if we considered goals could be traded in the same way physical currency could. What would is a Premier League goal worth against the Bundesliga? How many Eredivisie strikes would warrant a move to a bigger league?

This is the core of what The Goal Markets is all about. The idea that goals, rather than just being numbers on a scoreboard, can be seen as a currency with value that fluctuates based on various statistical factors.

What to Expect:

• How Goals Are Converted: A breakdown of the methodology that determines the value of each goal scored in a match.

• Insights from Real Matches: Examples of recent games where the currency conversion model revealed surprising insights that traditional analysis might have missed.

• Why This Matters: A discussion on why understanding the value of goals in this way can shift perspectives on team performance, player evaluation, and match outcomes.

What It Actually Means:

The bedrock of this whole newsletter are the exchange rates themselves. Rates that will change with every goal that is scored in the eight major European leagues that the data is collected from.

Without giving away the alchemy behind it, here are the current exchange rates as of January 16th:

If we take the Premier League as the equivalent of British Pounds, we can see that all the other leagues have their worth calculated below and an example would be that if a player scored 10 Bundesliga goals, they would be worth 8.38 in the Premier League.

Why could this be important? It could be because a player has switched leagues and we want to try and add context to their move in terms of gauging success, it could also be that a player is linked for a move across leagues and we want to get an idea of the benchmarks required.

The Top 20:

To add further context to how the exchange rates, we can take the top 20 goalscorers across the European T5 leagues and see how many goals they have actually scored when it comes to Premier League worth.

As we can see the top four players in the list are Premier League players (an interesting point in itself and one to look into further down the line) therefore the goals scored are a simply 1=1 conversion.

However, if we move to Harry Kane in fourth we can see that his 16 Bundesliga goals that the he has currently scored have been put through the currency converter and are worth 13.41 Premier League goals.

While another man who is rarely off the continental scoresheets is Robert Lewandowski and whereas he has also scored 16 goals this season. The La Liga to Premier League exchange rate currently sits at 0.738 meaning those 16 are actually worth 11.80 in the top tier of English football.

Whereas someone such Mateo Retegui who has burst on the scene this season after leading the Serie A scoring charts for Atalanta could be linked with a Premier League move in the summer.

Therefore, the goals he is currently scoring in Italy could set the necessary benchmark for the 2025/26 if the Italian is to move on and he does not have to move to the Premier League for us to make a currency conversion.

Any of the eight leagues can be converted against each other. Therefore, we can calculate a player’s goal contribution from Ligue 1 to La Liga or the Eredivisie to the Scottish Premiership with other non-European leagues also being rolled out in due course.

In due course, we will be looking at potential moves and the expected of goals in a non-expected goals format, plus we’ll be looking back at the moves that have already happened and whether they were value for money.

This concept is far from the finished article and this is where your feedback comes in very handy. Any suggestions to the modelling or players you want to see put through the currency converter, please let me know in the comments or by emailing me at:

[email protected]

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