The Real Cost of Success

How Football Inflation is Outpacing Reality and What It Means for Celtic

Over the coming 10 days we will be writing a series of articles about inflation, player trading, taxation and infastructure spend at Celtic. This first article (on football inflation) is available to everyone. The remainder will be available to members of the Celtic Underground Community. To find out more, please subscribe.

Everyone reading this will be all too familiar with inflation. Yesterday was inflation figures day and the news has been full of the ‘shock’ rise to 3.6%. This gradual rise in prices over time impacts all our everyday spending. But in football, inflation operates at a different speed, and in a completely different stratosphere. While filling your car or shopping basked may have gone up 20% over the past five years, football transfer fees have risen hundreds, even thousands of percent in certain cases. This phenomenon, football inflation, is not merely a quirk of a booming sport. It’s a fundamental force reshaping how clubs like Celtic must operate in the global market.

While the UK’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) has averaged around 2–3% per year over the past few decades, the cost of footballers has grown at an astonishing rate. According to research from the CIES Football Observatory, average transfer fees in the top five European leagues have more than quadrupled since 2010. Even when clubs aren't paying stratospheric fees like the €222 million for Neymar, the mid-tier players now cost what elite players did just a few years ago.

For a club like Celtic, rooted in Scottish football’s much more modest financial ecosystem, this presents a unique dilemma. Domestically, transfer values haven’t exploded. Within the SPFL, the financial arms race has been less dramatic - partially due to lower broadcasting revenues, fanbase size, and commercial income. But Celtic don’t operate in a vacuum. The players they want, the scouts they hire, and the systems they need to implement all exist in a global market.

For players, Celtic shop internationally and that means we’re exposed to the same football inflation as clubs in England, Germany, and beyond.

To understand the scale of football inflation, consider a few examples from Celtic’s past.

• Tosh McKinlay, signed in 1994 for around £350,000. Adjusted for standard inflation, that would be around £750,000 today. But in football inflation terms, looking at equivalent full-backs with international experience, a player like McKinlay today might cost upwards of £5 million. At his standard, age and ability, we would now be looking at that level of player as a back-up to KT.

• Teemu Pukki, signed in 2013 for just over £2 million. Even ignoring the irony that Norwich eventually got a Premier League goal-machine for free, a similar forward today, with top-level experience but not quite proven at the elite level would likely cost £7–8 million if not more.

• Chris Sutton was signed in 2000 for £6 million (then a record for the club). Using football inflation metrics, this would be the equivalent of £35–40 million today, possibly more, given the striker’s pedigree.

• Neil Lennon, signed for around £6 million in 2000. That fee would also translate to around £30–35 million today, reflecting the premium on experienced midfielders who can lead a team.

You might say that these signings were so long ago that comparsions start to be too difficult so let’s look at recent buys and apply football inflation:

• Cameron Carter-Vickers, signed for £6 million in 2022, is now looking like a bargain. A similar level of defender – young, experienced, international pedigree – would likely cost closer to £15–20 million in the 2025 market.

• Alistair Johnston, a £3 million signing in late 2022, has seen his value skyrocket through European performances. Today, players with a similar profile are routinely changing hands for £10 million+ in the English Championship alone.

• Reo Hatate offered value at a purchase price of just £1.6m which, in the short period of time only rises to £2.4m

• Christopher Jullien, another centre half with challenges over pace and phsyicality, but still a quality player whose career was massively impacted by that goalpost collission was acquired for £7m. a player with his profile would command a fee of upwards of £25m today.

• Odsonne Édouard, our most expensive buy in Brendan’s last tenure and may be kicking around for free 8 years later but we sold at quite a profit. The challenge is that a £9m price in 2018 equates to circa £36m today.

So why does this matter?

Because Celtic, despite being dominant domestically, are still trying to punch above their weight in Europe. And to do that, we need to shop in the same markets as clubs with five or ten times our spending power.

UEFA’s financial regulations, including new squad cost control measures, do add some guardrails to the wildest spending. But they don’t level the playing field entirely. Clubs in England are still receiving over £100 million per season in TV revenue. Celtic, by contrast, get less than £3 million from the SPFL deal.

This mismatch means that unless Celtic are continually upgrading how we spend, both in absolute terms and in how smart that spending is, we risk stagnation or even regression.

Shopping in the same price bracket year after year might seem prudent, but in football terms, it’s akin to shopping at Poundland in 1999 and still shopping there now expecting to find the same quality. The world has moved on. So must we.

The board at Celtic face a difficult balancing act. We cannot overspend. Due in part to the Murray fueled arms race of the turn of the century and consequences 12 years later, financial prudence is deemed as crucial by our board (Dermot), particularly with limited domestic income. But being too cautious is equally dangerous. If we insist on only shopping in the £2–3 million bracket, the quality of players we can attract will decrease each year, not because of a lack of scouting, but because the footballing equivalent of £3 million in 2025 is worth far less than it was in 2015.

There are solutions.

Investing in data and analytics, upgrading our academy, and expanding our global scouting network are all ways to “buy smarter”, to spot undervalued talent before the market inflates their value. But even these areas require investment. The very tools needed to find value are themselves rising in cost.

Football inflation is not just a numbers game, it’s a strategic challenge that defines the future of player trading clubs like Celtic. We can’t change the financial might of the English Premier League, nor can we halt global market trends. But we can choose to acknowledge the reality we face, adapt our strategy, and invest accordingly.

If we don’t, we risk falling behind. Not because we stopped trying, but because we refused to accept that yesterday’s money doesn’t buy tomorrow’s success.