Vollernomics: Inflation estimated at 313%, youths over 450%

In the second of this series on the economy in GW Voller (if you missed the first, find it here or just scroll down!) I look at the headline figures on inflation.

And they're pretty shocking. 313% over last season means a player is now worth more than 3x what he was a season ago.

Before we go any further, disclaimers are important. I can't be certain in my sampling methods. The last post outlines why. In addition, to produce an inflation figure I ought to have prices from last season to compare to. I don't, because I hadn't thought of starting to collect the data then. However, at that time I remember that MV was almost always exactly AF or just a few k higher. And whilst AF's have risen slightly in the last season, they're not hugely higher. So I am using current AF figures to estimate player MV at this time last season, in the expectation that these two factors will more or less cancel each other out. Finally, I had to decide how heavily to weigh the 33 categories I sampled in my inflation "basket". In the end I decided that all 11 positions should be weighed equally, and that superstars should be considered to make up 20% of the basket, core senior players 50% and youths 30% - this was based on a pretty arbitrary estimate of how many transfers in the past season have fallen in each category. Oh and finally the system relies on MV, which some think is a load of rubbish. Actually I don't think it is, but even if you do you can't blame me for that - blame SI!

Now, the figures. As mentioned the headline figure this methodology produced is 313%. But the broken down findings are also quite interesting. The inflation rates on superstars (245%) and core senior players (256%) were very similar, indicating that the very top players aren't experiencing an enormous spiral in prices beyond others of a lower quality. But there is a big difference with youths, where inflation was at 455%. Indeed youth goalkeepers were the most inflated area of the market as a whole, coming in at a whopping 503% - i.e. costing 5x more than they did a season ago.

Positions wise inflation was fairly uniform. Defenders (300%) lagged slightly behind midfielders (323%), goalkeepers (325%) and strikers (329%) but I reckon that is probably almost within the margin of error of my samples.

What does all this mean? Well, there's good news and bad news. Firstly, the good news. I think it tells us that the database is fairly well balanced. If there was a real shortage of quality strikers for example, we'd expect to see striker inflation much higher than other categories. It isn't. There is a very slight bias against wingers and wide midfielders (inflation 309%) compared to central midfielders (inflation 336%) but I had expected this might be a much bigger gap given the popularity of narrow formations under the current ME.

The outlier figure is obviously youth. However, I think this is at least in part temporary - explained by it taking a while for academies to churn out the full quota of youth players the game expects. But in part it's probably down to the bias of many managers towards youths. That will probably sustain but even so if you're not already in it, youth certainly doesn't look to me like a good route to go down just now. The market is valuing even a fairly standard youth at 3.5x AF (16k v 55k) so you'll pay through the nose for your purchases, and as supply from academies increases I think there's a fair chance those prices will fall back again.

So on the whole the database is balanced and consistent, and apart from the current situation with youth and the trickle of unlocked players I think supply is fairly constant. The bad news is therefore that the new system has failed to control rises in demand adequately, and consequently prices have been pushed up hugely. This was entirely predictable because of the extra £975m in prize money that is flowing in to the GW this season (compared with last season) as a result of Season 1 performance, and without many more ways of it flowing out of the GW - wages have stayed pretty much stable, and no-one needs to do serious stadium work yet. More bad news is that next season prize money will increase again. However, higher team reps may cause greater wage rises and incentivise higher levels of stadium investment. Plus anecdotal evidence suggests a lot of teams are in debt right now, so they may choose to use increased winnings to pay that down. I will have a small wager that next season we will see significant inflation, but that it will be (just) under 100% - i.e. we won't see player prices doubling.

Ah but, I can hear you say... why does this inflation matter? In fact, isn't it good that teams have more money, it makes the game interesting by encouraging transfers and the community activity they provoke. Well whilst those are indeed good things, I think the damage caused is much greater. I'll outline why in the next post. If you can't wait until then, go and read back the forum posts by myheadhurts whilst discussing the post-reset economic model. (S)he was spot on...