JAKE’S ROAD REPORT is Gemini Sports' founder Jake Schuster’s weekly dispatch from the frontlines of professional football. Jake travels the globe meeting with club executives and generating candid insights around the intersection of AI and the beautiful game. These are raw thoughts and actionable intelligence, delivered every week. All meeting details are kept confidential, and specific intel is always omitted.
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A Premier League Sporting Director recently highlighted to me just how problematic pricing has become in professional football.
The club had a homegrown academy player attracting significant interest. Despite receiving multiple offers around €10 million, Transfermarkt.de valued the same player at just €200,000. The real kicker? The club had reason to believe this player could have commanded €15 million—either by waiting another six months or simply by setting that asking price. That's a 50% pricing miss on a pure-profit sale!
The media makes much of misses when big-money purchases don’t work out, but failing to sell properly can be just as impactful, and getting it right has outsized benefits.
We all know such academy opportunities don't grow on trees, so why isn't the industry putting more energy into developing appropriate pricing frameworks? It's remarkable clubs still rely primarily on two flawed pricing mechanisms: a publicly crowdsourced site like Transfermarkt and whatever figure comes from negotiations between agents and selling clubs.
This approach leaves enormous value on the table. Clubs should be investing in—or developing internally—benchmark metrics and models that can be directionally accurate most of the time. Whether you're buying or selling, having reliable pricing benchmarks is essential.
Consider Declan Rice's £105 million transfer to Arsenal. Our models valued him at £85-90 million based on his performance metrics and projected impact. He's clearly an exceptional player (and a likely future England captain). But the market premium reflected scarcity as much as ability. When there are no other top-shelf alternatives available and a rival club enters the bidding, prices inevitably inflate.
The point isn't that Arsenal shouldn't have paid £105 million, but that clubs need reliable reference points as starting positions and clear upper limits based on objective analysis. Flying blind without these benchmarks feels reckless, and I don’t love it when I hear some remark, “it’s hard to get it right”. Sure it is, but it’s also very important.
It's time to apply rigor to an area directly impacting the balance sheet most: pricing.
