I spent €125,000,000 on one player during the January transfer window. Meet Alessandro Polenta, 23-year-old Italy left winger, ex of Barcelona, and in my estimation, The Best Player In The World.
Here’s Alessandro Polenta’s transfer history, just to give you a sense of the shape his career has taken. He started as a 15-year-old at the youth academy of Novara (technically one of our fiercest rivals, though as they play in Serie C1 it’s been a while since we thought about them). After a year, during which he made seven starts with the senior team, he was bought by Ancona, also of Serie C1, for €40k. As a 16-year-old, he made 29 starts for Ancona, scoring a goal and racking up six assists, before Genoa came along and took him for €650k. He made 21 starts for Genoa in Serie A as a 17-year-old, at which point Ajax snapped him up for €9.5 million. After his first season with Ajax, Barcelona appeared and bought him for €28 million. He spent three and a half seasons at the Nou Camp, during which he made 113 appearances—and effectively ended the career of Ahmed Vaz, one of the great wingers in modern football history—before we showed up and made him the most expensive player in the history of the world.
Is he worth it? No, he isn’t. Let there be no ambiguity about this: He absolutely is not worth it. No single player could ever be worth €125,000,000. I haven’t done the math, but I’d guess that we won our first scudetto without having spent that much on the entire team. €125 million is fully 25% of the total sum I’ve spent on transfers since coming to Pro Vercelli, and I’ve bought 95 players. From a prudent, dollar-maximizing, bargain-genius perspective, this can only go down as the worst transfer I’ve ever made.
So why did we buy him? Well, let’s look at it from another side. We were curled up around a transfer budget of €156 million and a total bank balance of around €250 million. We’re making money faster than we can spend it, and right now, the money isn’t going to any use. I love watching the balance grow, because it means security: in a worst-case scenario, we can do a full Real Madrid thrash-about and buy ourselves a whole new team. But there’s a level of wealth at which even that aim becomes superfluous. €125 million won’t pull on a kit and go play for us on the pitch, and there’s no real reason to sit on a quarter of a billion inert euros when I want to coach, and I’m pretty sure the fans in Vercelli want to watch, the best players around.
On top of that, Polenta has spent the last few years in my mind as the unquestioned One That Got Away. I first spotted him when he was at Genoa, when I thought about picking him up for €8-10 million and ultimately, for reasons that have since escaped me, decided not to. Watching him shine at Ajax and Barcelona obviously made me rue that decision, and now, as I’m relishing our new crop of talented young Italian players—Martini, Caprioli, Proietti, Carbone, Capuano, et. al.—seemed like a good moment to put things right.
So in another sense, he is worth it, because even though the money was absurd—Barcelona really didn’t want to sell him, and the only thing that saved us was that he really wanted to come—the money was also, by itself, completely meaningless. And while we’re trying to lay down a message for the rest of the world with our adoption of the 3-4-3—roughly, that message is run—a concise display of our financial power can’t help but underscore the point. I don’t expect him to have an impact on the club that’s proportional to the transfer fee, but I think he’ll be fun to have around, he’ll make us measurably better, and he’ll fit into the core of emerging youth players whom I hope to have around for many years to come. I give you, then, young Alessandro Polenta:
His personality is “Professional.” His right foot is “Strong.” His left foot is “Very Strong.” I think he might get a bit better. He plays as a left midfielder, instantly improving the weakest part of our attack (David is just not at the level of most of the rest of the team, Ahmed Vaz is 35, and Michael Dogan is better as a defender). Finally, since he allows us to move Dogan to centerback, he helps us cope with the injury crisis we’re currently undergoing: Riccardo Caprioli (our best defender) is out for three months with a torn calf muscle, and Hugo (who we brought in specifically as a backup for the defense) has broken his collarbone. With Polenta on the team, we can move Dogan to the back line, where he’s better anyway, without losing anything from the attack.
The injury epidemic has slowed down our feverish goalscoring pace—we’ve also lost our leading scorer, Andreas Andersson, for three months—and made it significantly tougher to win games. But we’re still leading Serie A and, in Polenta’s first three matches, we beat Inter 2-1 in the 1910 Derby, Juventus 3-0 in Turin, and Inter again, 2-0 this time, in the Coppa Italia quarterfinal. We’d opened an eight-point lead over Inter through 20 games, but we were held to draws by Empoli and Lecce, and we lost a maddening game against Milan at the San Siro (we dominated the match, but gave up a fluke goal on the point of halftime and went down 1-0), which has helped Inter cut the lead to three with 11 games left to play.
That’s worrisome, and it could make for a terrifying end to the season. But our injured players are starting to heal, and as Polenta blends into the squad, I’m counting on a swift return to form. To make things that much more dramatic, we’ve drawn Barcelona in the quarterfinal of the Champions League, after smashing Liverpool 4-1 in the first knockout round. Barça, don’t forget, broke their own transfer record when they bought Tim Hauk from us last summer, making this a sort of Battle of the Endless Strings of Zeroes. To make things that much less dramatic, however, Polenta is cup-tied for the Champions League and won’t be able to play in the tie.
Other news of note: The arrival of Alessandro Polenta gave us no choice but to sell David, who went to Atlético for €11 million. He was excited to move back to Spain, he’s still in his prime (still just 27, actually), and after 371 appearances, 81 goals, and 65 assists for Pro Vercelli, he deserved to go someplace where he’d be able to play consistently rather than languish on the bench for us. He was a huge part of our promotion from Serie B and of our early successes in the top division. Spare him a fond thought.
We also sold Ander Irureta, the Spanish striker we bought just a few months ago, to Roma for €40 million. He was a crushing disaster for the club—two goals in 13 appearances, an average rating of 6.59, and an unchangeable motivation level of “nervous.” At 30, he was too old to keep around in the faint hope that he’d improve, especially when that kind of cash was on the table. I didn’t sign a replacement (possibly a mistake, given Andersson’s calf tear) but decided to let our youth star Luca Leone take over Irureta’s minutes. I don’t expect Leone to contribute much at this stage, but Irureta was doing absolutely nothing, and if I want a player to do absolutely nothing, I might as well use the one that’s free.
Read More: Football Manager 2009, Pixel Dramas, Pro Vercelli
by Brian Phillips · August 26, 2009
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Pro V had 250M in the bank? And the club hasn’t considered using some of that to add more seats to Naming Rights Park and boost ticket sales?
We’ve been adding seats every year—8000+ last summer. Doesn’t really make a dent.
That has to be the largest transfer fee of all time. Do you have a short list of the other biggies?
Pro Vercelli has already won everything else – why not the title of biggest transfer payout as well? Yeah, you’ve definitely arrived. Any chance you could post a list of the most valuable clubs in the game/world? I remember you were fourth a few game years ago…
Thats an insane amount of money. And he’s only 23? Damn.
Who’s going to throw up more than a quarter billion for a single player? I suspect you’ll either make a dramatic loss or keep him until he retires.
Either way, its a good shout.
In addition to being the best player in the world, Alessandro tastes delicious with sopressa and mushrooms.
Could you explain exactly why you think Polenta is the best player in the world? For one, this is a slap in the face to your own captain the great Michael Dogan. Secondly, I took a look ad Vaz’s stats from the last Vercelli post, and he has better Technical and Mental attributes, with only slightly lesser physical ones. Especially with you playing the 3-4-3, I would think a left winger who has 16+ for Crossing, Dribbling, Marking, and Tackling would be perfect.
I once spent £110m on a player; the mostly non-fictional Miralem Pjanic who sat neatly in the attacking midefield spot with a team built around him… It was a fiasco that forced me to ultimately resign.
Despite joining in early January he comfortably became the leagues top assister and scored a healthy 1 in 2 or thereabouts for the two years I managed him with an average rating of 7.34.
He was just too damn good and stopped the game being fun, wins came far too easily and I completed the 100-point season. The Mirror ran a series of scathing articles on how I bought the league and brought the money that ruined football. The Times kept calling us a one-man team and as for the Sun…. Well ok, I didn’t read the Sun.
I had to take a job at lowly Xerez to escape the dystopia I had created – I sat down at the bullet-riddled desk and decided ‘not in my name’
Pjanic is a beast.
Will — Polenta’s right foot is a lot stronger than Vaz’s. I’m increasingly convinced that two-footedness is a hugely underrated asset within the game. Also, Vaz’s abilities are on the verge of free fall—his physical and a couple of his technical abilities have lost a point or two since I signed him.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Vito Scalpi.
One question I’ve been meaning to ask, since you signed Vaz: does having a really good set of players help the younger ones coming on in any measurable way?
So you spent 125 million euros on a player because you think “he’ll be fun to have around.” Now this is a philosophy I can fully support.
I never spent such a sum for a single player, I’m a bit greedy, then I only buy players I really need, but I can see your point, hopefully he’ll be able to blend well with your team.
Brian-
Yeah two-footedness is really nice since they can turn around and still cross. I used to run my team with a left winger with a better right foot than left and the defenses consistently were bamboozled by the sudden turns and crosses.
I find it odd that hubris and debris are spelled similarly, yet pronounced so distinctly.
I seriously hope this does not explode – I can hear ALL the other players’ cries for wages this summer…
Elliot brings up a good point:
What is Polenta’s wage? How does it compare to the rest of the team?
Polenta has a nasty scum-stache.
Eric that is hilarious.
Somewhere in tiny digital New York, a tiny digital 41-year-old Polish woman named Kasia comments wryly about how annoying it is when everyone thinks you’re named after a carbohydrate-rich staple food.
Sean – His wage is 150,000 euros a week. It said in the picture Brian posted 😉
James- Touche. Still wondering how it compares to the rest of the team. I’m far too lazy to sort through the posts to find pictures of players.
Sean- I wasn’t too lazy, and I found that, in the other pictures, the salary, value, date of birth, etc. were cut off. I’m also curious as to how Polenta’s salary compares to his teammates.
Keep up the good work, Brian. Your blog is a joy to read.
“Sometimes the most expensive fictional players are the cheapest”
The wages still crazy!
any update!? Is it sad that PV is the first thing I check in the morning when I get to work?
Coming later today. I’ve been out of it the last couple of weeks.
Yeah i figured. I’ve been starting to get really anxious, thinking about whether Polenta’s lack of defensive abilities is going to hurt the tactics, you know the important things…