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Ryan O’Hanlon
Are attackers the most valuable players in football? Or do we just think they are the most valuable players because we are better able to measure everything they do? The answer is obvious and impossible – at the same time.
Establishing expected goals or xG, among other things, showed that the best goal-scorers score a lot of goals because they take a lot of high-value shots. Finishing skill matters, but only at the margins. The ability to repeatedly find space, or create space near the goal, is the unifying skill among all the best scorers on the planet.
From there, we can see the players who scored the expected goals with their passes, and we get a good idea of who the best creators are. But once you take a step back from the path that leads to the goal, you’ll soon find yourself subscribing to goal-only nihilism.
All attempts to quantify what happens away from goal have led to similar conclusions: what happens between the boxes does not have much of an impact on whether a goal is scored.
A beautiful turn by a midfielder through pressure in his own half to get his head on a cross over a defender may require more skill than that of a centre-forward, but the latter is the one that directly affects the score line. And goals win games, so congratulations on your press-resistant manipulation of the cover shadow, but our big man just nailed one with his meaty forehead and we’ve now got three points.
It feels wrong and right somehow. We know that midfielders matter because we have seen many teams change their midfield and completely change the way they play. But we also know that a midfielder cannot single-handedly win games in the same way as an on-fire attacker can.
With the proliferation of tracking and movement data, there are all kinds of PhD-level approaches that can be applied to these questions of player value: particle physics, biomechanics, rocket science can all reveal new knowledge about how games work.
And I hope so, but I’m no particle physicist, biomechanist, or rocket scientist. So, for today, I want to focus on a more specific and universal definition of value: money. how much do you do Premier League Teams pay players at different positions, and what does this tell us about how the world’s richest league values each?
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average value of premier league players
To start, let’s look at the average Premier League salary per position.
For this, we are using data from the site FBref. It is a combination of confirmed and estimated data, but it is broadly accurate and makes it more useful when looking at large aggregate numbers. I made the somewhat arbitrary decision to cut down the list of players who make $500,000 per year, according to FBref. And that gives us 557 players: 145 forwards, 150 midfielders, 199 defenders and 63 goalkeepers.
Of course, we can get more granular than those designations, but the further you drill down, the smaller the sample becomes for each condition. And while there is also overlap between defenders and midfielders and forwards, the distinction becomes even more blurred when we start talking about wingbacks and fullbacks and box-to-box midfielders. As for the actual designation for any player, we’re adopting whatever is listed by FBref as his primary position.
So, here’s what the average Premier League player makes in each of the four positions:
• Next: $5.27 million/year
• Midfielder: $5.31 million/year
• Defender: $4.38 million/year
• Goalkeeper: $3.29 million/year
Based on that alone, we would say that forwards and midfielders are premium positions in the Premier League, then there is a gap for defenders, and another gap for goalkeepers.
This probably makes some intuitive sense: not a forward and a midfielder. He Different from each other, and given my arbitrary cutoff point, I think the difference between the two is mostly meaningless. It should also be noted that attacking midfielders such as Phil Foden, martin odegaard And florian wertz Here everyone is categorized under the midfield designation, which helps increase the value of the position group. Therefore, the further you move from the target, the lower the cost to the players.
Still, it’s surprising that midfielders outperform attackers here – even with those caveats. My theory is that midfielders are more interchangeable than attackers. Therefore, there is a larger pool of reliable midfielders that teams value, and this increases the overall average at the position.
Furthermore, teams are less willing to experiment with less experienced and therefore lower paid midfielders in the same way they can with attackers. A mistake made by a young attacker is not anywhere near as punished as a mistake made by a young midfielder, and so there may be a higher salary level for midfielders than attackers.
Value of the average Premier League starter
Continuing that thought: defenders are rarely outplayed in a match, and in an ideal world, most teams would only use one goalkeeper for the entire season. And so, players beyond the entry level at those positions make significantly less money than entry-level players, and that pulls the average down.
So, what if we only look at the starters?
To define “starter”, I will not look at who is actually starting the match, but rather which players are being paid as starters. The 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 is the most popular formation in the Premier League, and there are 20 teams, so we can simply multiply those numbers and find out how much players are being paid as starters in each position.
It obviously doesn’t work quite like this in the uneven financial landscape of the Premier League, but I’m defining a starter as the 20th highest paid goalkeepers, 80th highest paid defenders, 60th highest paid midfielders and 60th highest paid attackers.
Result:
• Forward: $9.53 million/year
• Midfielder: $9.30 million/year
• Guard: $7.48 million/year
• Goalkeeper: $6.55 million/year
Put another way, here’s how much of a premium you’d have to pay to go from an average player to a starter at each position:
• Forward: 80.6%
• Midfielder: 75.1%
• Defender: 70.9%
• Goalkeeper: 99.3%
This, again, makes sense. Since only one goalkeeper can play at a time and a goalkeeper continues to play unless he makes too many mistakes or gets injured, starting players make much more money than the average player at that position.
Starting forwards earn much more than the average forward, which begins to confirm some of the ideas we talked about in the beginning. The split between midfield starters and average midfielders is less because more midfielders tend to play. And the split among defenders is less because, well, there are fewer defenders who don’t start because more defenders start.
On top of that, I think there’s also a bit of risk in both of these areas: a backup goalkeeper or forward may be a lower-paid prospect, but teams want players they feel are more reliable in midfield and defense.
If we take the 4-3-3 as a basis, here’s what the average “starting unit” earns in the Premier League:
• Goalkeeper: $6.55 million
• Defense: $29.9 million
• Midfield: $27.9 million
• Attack: $28.6 million
I think it’s interesting that there really isn’t a huge difference in how teams are valuing each unit overall. And if we add goalies on defense, we can also say that teams are spending the most money on “goal suppression”: $36.5 million.
Obviously many defenders, especially fullbacks, also contribute to the attacking game. But I really think there is a sharp trend emerging.
If we accept that a large portion of midfield spending is coming from attacking midfielders, whose value comes primarily from their contributions near goal, then we can increase that “attacking” value and reduce midfield value. This would mean that teams are aligned with the analytical idea that everything that happens near the goal, whether defending itself or attacking the other, is the most valuable.
value of premier league stars
We know that the value of a point increases the higher you go up the table. In other words, going from 44 points to 45 points is much easier than going from 89 points to 90 points. But does that mean the league’s best teams are spending their money just like everyone else – just spending more money to have the same positional distribution?
Here, I am defining a star player as a starter in a top four team in the league. So, with the starter section outlined, this gives us the four highest paid goalkeepers, 16 defenders, 12 midfielders and 12 forwards. Here’s how they average out:
• Forward: $18.7 million
• Midfielder: $15.7 million
• Guard: $13.5 million
• Goalkeeper: $11.6 million
And if we look at the premium you have to pay to go from “Starter” to “Star”, this is what it looks like in each situation:
• Forward: 96.1%
• Midfielder: 69.2%
• Defender: 80.8%
• Goalkeeper: 76.3%
To build a star-studded starting lineup, you’ll spend $11.6 million on your goalkeeper, $54 million on your defense, $47.1 million on your midfield, and $56 million on your attack.
The Premier League is telling us a lot of different things about where teams are investing their money. The league places a high value on ability in midfield, but there is a limit to the value a midfielder can provide, and the better a team gets, the lower that limit becomes. I hadn’t even thought about it before, but the way money is allocated in the Premier League suggests that midfielders are actually more valuable to bad teams than good teams. And I think I agree.
As a friend told me, adding a good midfielder to a bad team is like putting a new engine in your broken 1985 Nissan Sentra: Suddenly it can get you from point A to point B. But the best teams in the league already have their engines; They need to add high-level details.
With goalkeepers and defenders, the higher you go in the food chain, the more valuable they become. Perhaps this is because defensive ability comes from teamwide organization at the bottom of the table, but as you go up, teams have to concede more goals, so their defense is often left disorganized and therefore more dependent on the individual talents of goalkeepers and defenders who can no longer be protected by the system around them.
As for attackers, they earn expensive salaries everywhere, and their relative cost really increases as you move up the competitive ladder. To go from an average Premier League starter to a star attacker in attack, you have to spend twice as much as you already pay.
We started by wondering what the comparative difference was between midfielders and attackers, and the league’s richest teams gave us an answer: star attackers are more valuable, by about 20%.
