PREMIER LEAGUE icon Alan Shearer’s staggering transfer fee in today’s market has been revealed.
The Englishman is the current record goalscorer in the Premier League with 260 goals.
Shearer is considered one of the greatest goalscorers to grace England’s top flight across his spells with Southampton, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle.
Shearer became the most expensive footballer in history when Newcastle signed him from Blackburn for £16.2million in 1996.
However, it has been suggested that in today’s climate, the striker would have been a lot more expensive.
Football finance expert Kieran Maguire and Jason Laws at the University of Liverpool have created a football inflation calculator, which can be used to find out the fees of footballers with inflation taken into account.
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Maguire explained how it works on Twitter: “It’s based on total revenues generated by PL each season, on basis that spending (either on wages or transfer fees) is linked to the ability to pay and therefore income generated by clubs, so reflects the inflation from higher ticket prices, TV deals etc.”
The ‘today fee’ is based on 2019 money, before it was affected by Covid-19.
Therefore along with the price of a pint of beer going from £1 to well over £5, a Shearer would now cost £222M.
This would make Shearer the most expensive transfer of all time, with the fee surpassing the £198m PSG paid to Barcelona for Neymar in 2017.
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Neymar’s move to France from Spain saw a new normal in the market of players being sold for over £100m.
He also cost more than other iconic players such as Roy Keane, who’s £3.75m transfer in 1993 from Nottingham Forest to Manchester United would now be worth £94.2m.
When speaking about the potential fee that he would have cost, Shearer told The Athletic: “How do I feel seeing my name at the top? It makes me smile!
“It’s not a reflection of achievement and, don’t worry, I’m not putting myself in [Kylian] Mbappe’s class, but I guess it puts historical fees into a modern context.
“Gary Lineker often says that it’s nice to see his name on goalscoring charts because it reminds people that he actually used to be a world-class footballer before he was a television presenter! I definitely empathise with that.
“Man, to be able to do it again, to score just one more goal, to be wheeling away with my right arm in the air, to have that rush, that lose-yourself moment when there’s nothing else but this — I’d give a lot for that.
“Football and time blur any notion of what value means, so I certainly can’t tell you I’d be worth £222m now.
“I can’t tell you much, except one thing: If I was 24 or 25 or 26? Yeah, I’d bang a few in.”
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
