In the modern transfer reporting landscape, you get an update at basically every step of a potential deal. You find out that a team is monitoring, that they have interest in a player. Then they start exploring the parameters of a deal, they engage intermediaries to explore the price points. When there is actually club to club talks or even an agreement that almost seems like old news because we have seen 32 previous updates that led to that.
Having a transfer that comes out of the blue with little foreshadowing is a shock, it is like the classic polar bear in Texas meme, where you are asking yourself what is going on here?
We got one here with the news that Chelsea and Aston Villa had come to an agreement on a £117m move for Morgan Rogers.
I was planning to write more about how Rogers would fit at Arsenal and thinking about getting a post drafted for when this saga came to an end and the signing was actually announced. I didn’t have this on my radar at all. When I first saw the tweet from David Ornstein I had to double check that this was the actual real reporter and that I wasn’t falling for someone trying to be funny or spoofing his account.
This news caught everyone off guard and led to thousands of WOWs and Holy Shits getting sent in group chats around the world.
Now that the shock has worn off a bit, I think it is time to digest what this means for Arsenal. Losing a primary target in mid-July scrambles the plan, and there's no point pretending otherwise. But the more I sat with the price Chelsea paid, the more my shock and disappointment started turning into something closer to relief.
Sticker Shock
It is far too common in this polarized world to have a nuanced opinion flattened out and you have to end up in the pro or anti camp, with no room for fence sitting or uncertainty.
Rogers is a great example of this. He’s got obvious talent, he’s an England international, and on top of that he has 33 non-penalty goals plus assists over the last two seasons in the toughest League in the world.
The list of players that can match his end product over the last two seasons is short.
Yet there is enough in his data where you aren’t certain that this player is worthy of being the most expensive English player ever.
It’s a bit moot now, but I really enjoyed digging into his data because it was so nice to try and understand the disconnect between the eye test and the data test on the player.
When you pay a record price, your money should be buying certainty. This is top 1%, sure thing, no doubts at all, and that is ultimately where this comes into dispute.
The public estimates for the valuations on transfermarkt had him at £77m. My estimate of his likely transfer fee put him at £100m but the actual valuation based on his production set his value significantly lower.
I think that the £54m estimate here is too low, his actual counting numbers, robustness, and physical traits would have pushed my own estimation higher here. I think that a “fair” price would have been much closer to the actual transfermarkt estimate of £75-85m. I think that you could have talked me into adding an extra 15% on this deal for a club like Arsenal that has a higher value on adding marginal points but that gets us into the mid £90m range and this is really starting to get to the levels where you’re stretching the justification for the valuations.
This is obviously not a perfect example (no such thing exists) but let’s take these two players. One is Rogers going for £117m and the other is a player that went for £68m last summer.
This probably isn’t the hardest quiz, Player B here is Eberechi Eze. He was three years older than Rogers is now, but he shared a similar track record of Premier League success and a similar versatility to play across the front line, and arguably was coming off a season of better production. I can understand why Rogers might be more expensive than Eze (age and remaining contract the big factors), but I am not sure I understand why a year later you would be paying a 70% premium on the fee that Arsenal paid to Crystal Palace.
None of this is a knock on the player. Rogers at 23 is exactly the profile you want to buy, and if he continues his current trajectory, £117m might not look too bad. The problem is that "if he continues his current trajectory" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. When you need a best case scenario situation for a deal to look acceptable you know that you have taken a big risk and that is exactly what this looks like.
Does history rhyme?
“History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes” - Mark Twain (maybe)
This situation gives me a bit of deja vu.
In January 2023, Chelsea came over the top for Mykhailo Mudryk to hijack a transfer that looked similarly certain to end with the player wearing red and white. Adam and I spent a good amount of time expressing that we should have more uncertainty about the deal and that this had the makings of a classic “winner’s curse”.
The "winner’s curse" is an auction phenomenon (which is a good approximation of transfers) where the winning bidder overpays for something with an uncertain value. This happens more often than not because bidders are making estimates based on imperfect information, and the winner is the party with the most optimistic estimate, meaning they often end up paying more than the asset's true intrinsic worth.
When you look at the history of the biggest transfers of all time the list is littered with flops and disappointments. Not that the players necessarily played poorly or even all that differently than they had previously but they never lived up to the giant expectations that were put upon them or what was needed to justify what was spent on them.
In the winter of 2023 Arsenal missed out on Mudryk but they were able to pivot to Leandro Trossard. Arsenal fans don’t need reminding but it never hurts, he just left the club having helped win the Premier League with clutch goals and two and half years of excellent performance.
I want to be careful here, because I have far more confidence in Rogers than I ever had in Mudryk, and the point is not that he'll fail at Chelsea. The point is that even though seeing another team swoop in and be able to plop down a larger pile of cash hurts the ego, this feeling and the actual outcome of the squad building are two completely separate things.
I have a ton of faith in Mikel Arteta and he will forget more about soccer than I’ll ever know but that doesn't mean he's perfect, or that he's beyond questioning. I can’t help but look at all of the data and come up thinking that Rogers wasn’t the answer to Arsenal’s left wing issue. He has done his best work drifting inside and he is not a natural fit as a player that spends most of his time near the touchline.
Arsenal are going to be shopping in an expensive tier to improve the team and I am comfortable with that but I’d like the player that they go after to have a bit less squinting and projecting to be able to justify the outlay. We don’t know exactly who Arsenal will pivot towards but this is a great point to plug Adam’s latest wide attackers rankings.
25/26 Wide Attackers, the final list
The World Cup knockout rounds are nearing their end, but the transfer market waits for no one.
Arsenal still have that gaping hole to address this summer, but with Rogers out of the picture, the money can go toward a player who actually matches the job description: comfortable holding width, stretching a defense, able to beat his man, while creating threat and end product. The worst version of this window was never missing out on Morgan Rogers, it was paying stupid money for him and still not having an answer at left winger. Chelsea just took that version off the table and now it is time for Arsenal to find a new solution.
Amen!
A more pertinent question, I would think, is why didn't we buy Olise two years ago? Bayern are no dummies. THey have poached two of the best attacking players from the EPL in recent time. Diaz and Olise light up the flanks. I'm not sure that Liverpool would have sold to us. But Palace are a different story.
You make a good point. I assumed that at the time Olise would have welcomed a move to Arsenal.