Bolasie, Stones among most overpriced summer transfers

The folks at CIES Football Observatory are well known for their number-crunching abilities. In the latest issue of their weekly post, they highlighted the top twenty over-priced transfers from this summer’s transfer window.

To some extent, this is understandable as the influx of cash in the Premier League thanks to television money has been largely responsible for the hyper-inflation of the transfer market that closed with deadline day last week.

CIES Football Observatory, Weekly Post 155

Per the collected data and the projections from the CIES folks, Everton overpaid for winger Yannick Bolasie from Crystal Palace by £18.8m (€22.4m). Even at the time of the transfer, there were some rumblings of discontent from Blues as they heard the transfer fee in question, but Ronald Koeman wanted his man, and Alan Pardew made sure he milked Everton for everything he could.

The same happened with defender John Stones, who put in a transfer request with the Toffees. Manchester City and Pep Guardiola really wanted a ball-playing defender and Koeman made sure that the Blues stuck to their guns with their valuation of the player. In the end City had to come up with the £49m (€58.5m), which was £17m (€20.3m) over the CIES value for the youngster.

What do you think, were Everton valid in overpaying for Bolasie and in the same vein, did they hold their own when not budging in Stones’s sale?