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FC Barcelona should sell Leo Messi NOW
O
K, a more
precise statement should be that it probably would maximize the long run
probabilities of FC Barcelona winning games and titles to sell Leo Messi as
soon as possible, but that I acknowledge that this will probably not happen and
that broader lessons can be extracted from it. I am a Barça fan and an admirer of Messi, but professional sports’ players
have an age profile such that they peak at some point between 25 and 30 years
old and after this peak their performance decline (Messi will be 27 this
season). Strikers that base their quality on speed, decline on average earlier
than other players. That does not mean that after their peak they decline
abruptly, but it may also happen. If you have an asset that is still highly
valued by potential buyers although it
is about to decline in performance, the asset should be sold, because with the
resources you could buy new assets that help you win more in the future: better
scouts, new players, new facilities for the youth teams. That is more so if
in your team you have another player that is going to be one of the best in the
world in the next few years. In the player transfer market, like in auctions or
takeovers, the selling parties usually have more bargaining power, and buyers
in soccer tend to overpay for strikers. I would not wait to sell Messi after
the next World Cup, which is played in Brasil, and the likelihood that Messi
and Argentina will fulfill their exaggerated expectations is low. Most
probably, Messi will lose value during the World Cup, even if he does not get
injured again during it or just before it. Messi has won four times the Ballon d’Or,
and has been free of injuries for four or five seasons. That will hardly
happen again. Of course, all this is a prediction, and events may prove me
wrong, but I try to stick to the rules of expert Nate Silver in making
predictions: combine data, past experiences and informed intuitions. Also, it
may happen that he is sold but that FC Barcelona runs into other problems (like
not sacking other players that have their mind more in the gossip magazines than
on the pitch) and stops winning for other reasons. However, FC Barcelona
probably will not sell him, because of the confluence of the endowment effect
and populism. Due to the endowment effect, a well-known bias in behavioral
economics, economic agents overestimate the value of assets they possess
relative to the same assets when they do not possess them. Populism is pervasive in
modern soccer especially in large markets like Barcelona, where two sports
newspapers and an army of talk shows and media journalists compete to keep lots
of voting and influencing fans excited. In the direct democracy of the best
European clubs, the short run passions of fans have more power than their long
run interests (these not being to maximize profits, but the probabilities of
winning in the future). Fans should be protected from their short run selves:
that is the broader lesson.
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