When Josep Maria Bartomeu was asked on RAC1 in July 2020 whether Arthur Melo was worth the 72 million euros Juventus had just paid for him, the FC Barcelona president did not cite a scouting report, an internal valuation or an econometric model. He said: "His value on Transfermarkt was 70 million."
That same year, about a thousand kilometres away, a 28-year-old social worker named Martin Freundl was maintaining the valuations of every Bundesliga player on a spreadsheet, from a village near Munich. He did it for free, as a hobby. "It is insane that professional clubs take my valuations seriously," he told Dutch magazine Follow the Money. "I am just a social worker, I do this Transfermarkt work for fun, and the football industry is worth millions. The contrast is insane."
Between those two sentences lies the whole story of Transfermarkt: a platform with no algorithm, no professional valuers and no charge to anyone who consults it, which has become the reference price for a global market. Not because its figures are the best, but because they are the only ones everyone looks at.
Un hobby de Hamburgo
Transfermarkt was born in May 2000 for a fairly unambitious reason. Matthias Seidel, a software engineer and Werder Bremen fan, lived in Hamburg and wanted to follow his club's rumours. "I was looking for a way to keep up with the news and rumours about Werder. That is why I founded Transfermarkt.de," he explained in the report the company published for its 25th anniversary.
A year later he added a public player database. And here is what defines the platform to this day: the database was filled in by users themselves. Minutes played, cards, injuries, contract lengths. Anonymous volunteers with first-hand information — one of them, a Werder fan nicknamed "The Brain", was eventually quoted by Der Spiegel — turned a forum into an archive. By 2008 the hobby had four full-time employees and, according to IVW audience figures, 168 million page views and 14.2 million visits in a single month, August of that year.
That was when the big money arrived. On 23 September 2008 Axel Springer announced the purchase of 51% of Transfermarkt GmbH & Co. KG. Seidel retained 49% and continued as managing director and editorial chief. The deal included a capital increase, and Jens Müffelmann, head of Springer's digital division, summed it up with the candour of a business plan: "With the acquisition of Transfermarkt.de, Axel Springer becomes, in addition to the press, also on the internet, the market leader in the sports sector." Bild, with its millions of readers, now had its own football database.
Since 2008 there has been no public confirmation that Springer has increased its stake above that 51%. Seidel left the company at the start of 2025, though he still writes match reports for the website he founded.
The English-language version arrived in 2009. Today Transfermarkt operates 27 international domains and, according to figures the company itself published in June 2025, has more than 1.3 million player profiles, 2 million match reports and over 100 million monthly visitors across all domains. External traffic estimators, which only measure individual domains, give a sense of the scale: Similarweb and Semrush attributed around 23.5 million visits to transfermarkt.com in March 2026, with sessions averaging more than nine minutes. Nobody spends nine minutes on a football website unless they are working on it.
¿Cómo se fija un precio sin algoritmo?
Here lies the industry's first misconception. Follow the Money interviewed scouts, sporting directors and sector observers, and almost all of them believed there was a mathematical model behind the valuations. There is not. Transfermarkt states this explicitly in its methodological guide: market values are determined by the community, following what the company calls "the wisdom of crowds".
The mechanism works as follows. Each league has a "godfather" (Pate), a volunteer responsible for its valuations. Users debate in the forum what each player is worth, contributing minutes, goals, age, contract, salary, international appearances, prestige and the club's financial situation. But it is not a vote: the final figure "is based solely on well-founded arguments" and is decided by the godfather together with his colleagues. An academic study from 2014 described it as a hierarchical "judge" principle, not a democratic one. Above the godfathers are regional administrators, and above everyone is Christian Schwarz, international head of market values, who harmonises consistency across leagues and handles complaints from clubs and players.
Schwarz is also the man who said the sentence the industry would rather not hear: "Clubs should not be making transfer decisions based on the figures on our website. Our method is not scientific."
Another common inaccuracy surrounds the frequency of updates. Transfermarkt's official guide states that each league receives a market value update "twice per season", normally after the end of the season and at the midpoint, plus interim updates for players who have exploded onto the scene or been recently signed. Follow the Money described it as "four times a year" for the major leagues, counting two major reviews and two minor ones. Both descriptions are compatible; what is not true is that a rigid, uniform calendar of four cut-off points exists.
And the temptation is real. Bart Tamsyn, Transfermarkt's regional manager for the Netherlands and Belgium, told Follow the Money that he and his colleagues occasionally receive offers of dinners or watches in exchange for a more generous valuation. Offers that, according to him, "only provoke laughter".
De qué vive Transfermarkt
From advertising. With traffic of that magnitude — Follow the Money spoke in 2020 of one billion monthly page views — banners are enough to sustain the operation, and the integration with Bild Digital after the Springer acquisition added commercial capacity. Like almost all major free football portals, Transfermarkt integrates betting odds sections and gambling advertising, including a specific transfer betting section on its British domain.
There is also a B2B layer, but not the one you might expect. Transfermarkt does not sell databases to clubs in the style of Opta or StatsBomb. What it sells is visibility: a Premium Service for player agents with professional PDF profiles, market value histories, statistics downloads and greater agency presence in the search function. According to the company itself, agency profiles receive more than 100,000 clicks a day. There is also a subscription, Transfermarkt Pro, with advanced features.
What does not exist is a revenue figure. Axel Springer does not break down Transfermarkt's results and, since it went private in 2019 with KKR, it has no obligation to do so. The figures circulating in commercial company data aggregators do not come from any primary source and should not be cited. This is one of the ironies of the case: the website that puts a public price on all of world football has no public price of its own.
Por qué nadie ha conseguido desplazarla
There is no shortage of competitors. The CIES Football Observatory in Neuchâtel has been calculating transfer values since 2010 using an econometric model; its most recent version, published in 2024 by Raffaele Poli, Roger Besson and Loïc Ravenel, was built on 8,389 real transfers that took place between 2014 and 2024. KPMG Football Benchmark has its own data-based model. Opta and Stats Perform sell performance data to clubs, media and bookmakers. All of them are arguably more "objective" than a fan forum. And none of them has taken Transfermarkt's place.
The reason is not technological. It is a network effect that has been feeding itself for 25 years. Transfermarkt is free, so everyone cites it: ESPN, L'Équipe, The Guardian, La Gazzetta dello Sport, and also UEFA, which used it as a source in a 2016 report. By citing it, they turn it into a standard. The standard attracts more users and more volunteers. More volunteers improve the database. And an unbroken historical database spanning a quarter of a century, with 1.3 million profiles, cannot be replicated with money: you would also need to replicate the habit of the entire planet looking there first, and doing so without charging anything.
Clubs know this. The annual reports of Olympique de Marseille, Olympique Lyonnais, Schalke 04, Hertha BSC, Hoffenheim and FC Porto have all cited Transfermarkt as the source of their squad values. Jacques-Henri Eyraud, then president of Marseille, boasted in 2018: "We invested 120 million in the last transfer window and, according to Transfermarkt, our players are worth around 200 million." Nick Kersten, head of scouting at NEC Nijmegen, was more graphic with Follow the Money: "The site is always open in my browser, usually with about fifteen tabs."
¿Acierta? Lo que dicen los estudios
The underlying question is whether those fan figures have any connection to what is actually paid. The academic literature — the real, peer-reviewed kind — gives a nuanced answer.
The first serious study was by Herm, Callsen-Bracker and Kreis in Sport Management Review (2014). With a small sample of 67 transfers from the 2011/12 Bundesliga winter window, they found that the community values explained almost all of the variance in actual fees, with an R² close to 0.90. Their conclusion: "excellent predictors".
Müller, Simons and Weinmann (European Journal of Operational Research, 2017) expanded the sample to 4,217 players from the five major leagues over six seasons and compared the crowd with their own statistical model. Result: a technical draw. The crowd was slightly better overall, especially at the higher fees; the model won in the bottom 90% of transfers and had the advantage of being transparent and replicable.
Peeters (International Journal of Forecasting, 2018) took a different approach: he used the aggregated Transfermarkt values to predict the results of more than a thousand international matches and found that they predicted outcomes better than the FIFA ranking and the ELO rating. Applied to betting, they produced "considerable monetary gains".
The most important study for understanding the bias is that of Coates and Parshakov (European Journal of Operational Research, 2022). They confirm that the values are correlated with actual fees, but are biased estimators: they overvalue cheap players, get the median almost exactly right and undervalue expensive ones. The further up the distribution, the more Transfermarkt falls short. McHale and Holmes (EJOR, 2023) closed the loop by showing that machine learning models with advanced performance metrics considerably improve fee prediction over linear regression, and in the process identified which clubs buy well — Liverpool and Atlético de Madrid — and which buy badly: Manchester United and Barcelona.
Follow the Money's own analysis fits that bias. On average, the Transfermarkt value differs from the actual fee by around 60%; for transfers above 10 million euros, the gap falls to 34%; and more than half of all estimates fall below the price that is ultimately paid. There is also a figure that dismantles the idea of "squad value" as an asset: between 62% and 70% of players in the major leagues — 81% in the Netherlands — never generate any transfer fee at all. The theoretical value exists on the website, not in the till.
Cuando el precio molesta
A market with public prices generates aggrieved parties, and Transfermarkt has them on record.
The most famous is Cristiano Ronaldo. At the start of 2020, Transfermarkt posted on Instagram an "ideal eleven" of Jorge Mendes clients with their valuations. Ronaldo appeared at 75 million, behind, among others, Bernardo Silva at 100. According to Daniel Busch, Transfermarkt's UK manager, as he told The Athletic, the player "told us he was not happy with his market value". Afterwards, according to the platform itself, he sent some emojis and blocked the account. In 2021 he joined Manchester United for around 20 million pounds.
Galatasaray contacted Transfermarkt in the summer of 2022 to complain about some graphics showing their players' values, and relations cooled; the company acknowledges that complaints of "ours are undervalued and rivals are overvalued" are a classic from the big Turkish clubs.
And then there is the case in which Transfermarkt ended up in court, not as a defendant but as evidence. In 2020, a former Valencia CF consultant alleged that Jorge Mendes and the club's owner, Peter Lim, had inflated the prices of several Portuguese players. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office shelved the complaint after finding that the fees paid were close to the values estimated on Transfermarkt. A Spanish prosecutor used the figures from some German volunteers to rule out a criminal offence.
La profecía y su límite
Is it then a self-fulfilling prophecy? Partly. When a Barcelona president defends a 72-million transfer with a "on Transfermarkt he was worth 70", the number stops being an estimate and becomes a negotiating argument, an anchor. Agents know it, sporting directors have it open in fifteen tabs and clubs carry it into their annual reports. In that sense, the valuation pushes the price.
But the studies mark the limit: the bias is systematic and known. Transfermarkt falls short precisely for the players where the most money moves, and those who truly negotiate — the ones paying the fees that Coates and Parshakov analysed — know this and adjust. The figure works as the starting point of the conversation, not its conclusion.
What is truly unusual about this case is not whether the figures are right or wrong. It is that an industry that spends billions on analysts, data and consultancies has decided, without anyone actually deciding it, that its public price reference should be set by a Bavarian social worker with a spreadsheet. Christian Schwarz already gave the warning: the method is not scientific. The industry listened and kept opening tabs.
