What Is Bruno Guimarães Actually Worth to Arsenal?
Running the numbers on the fee, the fit, and the age curve
The Arsenal interest in Bruno Guimarães continues to heat up.
The latest news from David Ornstein in the Athletic is that he has informed Newcastle of his wish to join Arsenal plus a second bid improving upon the one made in June.
I have already gone more in depth on what the player can do in the stats scouting article and more recently when the links to him first started. So that would be the place to go if you want to learn more about the player, instead today I want to dig more into what factors should be weighed up here in trying to decide if this transfer makes sense or not for Arsenal.
For this we will break it down into trying to figure out what a fair price range would be for the player, making the case for it, talking about the opportunity cost and alternatives. Lets get into it.
Attempting a valuation
I have always been fascinated with trying to think about the valuations on players. My University degree was in economics and thinking about the market (and non-market) forces at play to value unique players is right in the wheelhouse of my interests.
I have played around with valuation models in the past and I have incorporated what I have learned and done further back testing to build an improved updated version here. I will do a full write up at some point but here is a high level view of things.
The estimated fee model is built from the player's last three seasons of performance, weighted toward the most recent, and it accounts for age, position, minutes played, contract length, and the level of competition. That output gets anchored to transfermarket’s estimates and calibrated against real completed transfers (adjusted for transfer inflation). It also knows English clubs pay a premium for the same player, which is why the Premier League number runs a bit higher. I purposefully include a range to be upfront that this is an estimate, and to capture the band where the fee most likely lands (historically, 90% of transfers fall inside it).
The second model is based on the “CannonStats Rating” an attempt to get a player’s skills and statistical output down to a single number, this is a very tough task and it will come with all of the usual caveats about data. I think everyone in analytics has to try at least once this and I have gone through many iterations of this over the years trying to find just the right weights and information to include. From this we use historical inflation adjusted transfers, age, position, minutes played, contract length, and the level of competition to estimate a player’s value if he were to be sold.
Here is what all of this gives us for Guimarães.
The transfer estimate model is at £50m, this is a bit lower than Transfermarkt’s £60m and Fotmob’s £54m but at least in the same ballpark. There is a fairly large spread on the estimated fee with the upper bound (which seems likely here given Newcastle’s stance) sitting just under £70m.
My rating system really likes the player and even with his age, this puts the valuation higher at £57m. The upper bound here is significantly higher pushing to £82m and this is a reflection of the fact that when you get into the elite tier of players, transfer fees start behaving in a more exponential fashion.
