Deflation at Record High

Rob Cooper announced today the findings of the UFFA's economic review concluding that, as of mid-February, the Player Price Index is facing deflation of 58%.


Transfer Desirability
All players in the game world have a ‘transfer desirability.’ This is a score between 1 and 10 which determines how ‘good’ the player is, based on their ability, perceived potential and their world reputation. Whenever a player is transferred their transfer desirability at the time is stored along with all the other details which include transfer fee, date and the acquisition fee of the player at the time of the transfer.


Market Value
To calculate Market Value (MV) for players we get the details of all the transfers (private deals, auctions and exchanges) that have taken place in the last year (28 days, real time). We then give each of these transfers a weighting based on how recent they are, so more recent transfers will be given higher weighting than older ones. Once we have the list we remove the top and bottom 5% (in terms of fee) to avoid any erroneous transfers upsetting MV. This leaves us with a weighted list of all the transfers that have taken place in the last year.

We are then able to divide up the transfers according to the aforementioned transfer desirability score so we can get at just the transfers amongst players with the same transfer desirability as the player we are calculating MV for. Because we store both the AF of the player and the fee when each player is sold we can calculate the difference, on average, between AF and transfer fee for all transfers that match this player’s transfer desirability. From this we can calculate a basic MV for the player in question e.g. if the average 8/10 player is being sold for 2x his AF then we can simply double this player’s AF to get his MV.


Age and Position
That is nice to know, but we aren’t done yet. In order to get more reliable MV information we go back to our weighted transfers and divide them up by age and by the best position of the player. Once we know what the typical difference is between AF and transfer fee for a player of his transfer desirability rating, age and best position we have a final inflation score for this type of player. We then take this and multiple the AF by this score to come up with MV.


The Player Price Index
Ok, and relax! We now know pretty much how MV is calculated and so, we are now ready to look into how we calculate player value inflation. As discussed above we calculate inflation values based on transfer desirability, age and best position – there are of course only so many combinations of these and every player must fit into one of these combinations. Using this we create a ‘Player Price Index’ which is similar to the Retail Price Index used by the government in the UK to measure inflation.

The way we construct this price index is to come up with an average FML team and give each of the aforementioned combinations of transfer desirability, age, and position a weighting based on how likely a player of that type is to appear in the squad. Once we have this we simply look at the inflation value for each type of player, multiply it by the weighting and add all the scores together. This will give us the current cost, in the market, to buy an ‘average’ FML team. By comparing the Player Price Index (PPI) at different points over time we are able to calculate inflation or deflation in player prices over that period. Typically, the period we look at is 28 days, which corresponds to a year in game time and so gives us an annual inflation rate.