What would Trevor Francis (first £1m player) be worth today with Football Inflation?

Sad to hear of Trevor Francis’ passing last month. I can still recall his goal for Nottingham Forest in the 1979 Champions League Final in Munich against Swedish club Malmo – his first European game for the club (see video). However, he will be most remembered for the transfer fee that Nottingham Forest paid Birmingham City in that same year – £1m, the first time a transfer fee hit the million pound mark in the English Football League. Up to that time the highest transfer fee was £500,000. However this was the start of normalising the £m for transfer fees.

So what would £1m be worth today in real terms but more importantly how would this compare to the transfer market today in the English Premier League. The Price of Football podcast did a tribute to Trevor Francis and University of Liverpool football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire came up with some figures. If you use the Retail Price index (same as CPI in New Zealand) Trevor Francis would cost £6.5m. However Maguire and his colleague at the University of Liverpool Jason Laws created Football inflation which is based on total revenues generated by the 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. Using this method Trevor Francis would be worth £253.5m.

Along with the price of a pint of beer going from £1 to well over £5, Allan Shearer would now cost £222m (original transfer fee £15m). 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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