Agence France Presse, Frédéric GARLAN, January 25, 2019
How much is my professional squad worth? For the training clubs that French soccer prides itself on, the accountant's answer is very disappointing: most often, not much.
Many solutions exist to try to give a more accurate picture of the situation, but only one, that of Ginkyo Ratings, has been developed in the context of a dialogue with Bercy on "the valuation of the intangible assets of companies".
The accounting practice considers the amount of the transfer of a player as an asset, appearing on the balance sheet of the acquiring club. However, a young player, trained at great expense by the club, has no value until he is sold.
The balance sheet of the training club does not reflect its true wealth ... which complicates its task when it must see its bankers to finance its investments, notes Pierre Caillet, the founder of Ginkyo.
The question of player valuation is all the more central as professional clubs generally do not own their stadiums. The players under contract represent a fundamental part of their assets.
" The clubs are well aware that their financial health depends on the quality of the investments made in their training centers," explains Mr. Caillet to AFP.
Contrary to the tools used by the profession, such as the German site TransferMarkt, which relies on the votes of Internet users, or the Swiss site CIES, whose algorithms grind the data provided by sports statisticians, Ginkyo's methodology is "transparent, independent and verifiable at any time".
This is an advantage over accounting giants such as KPMG, which has just unveiled its own evaluation method, also based on the processing of sports data.
For the past five years, for the five major European leagues, Ginkyo has been evaluating players' abilities twice a year in seven areas: health, physical, relational, technical, tactical, potential and mental...
These criteria are broken down into some 200 indicators - such as "quality of ball handling" or "reading the game" - rated by independent evaluators, ex-coaches or professional players. Ginkyo pays about 15 of them, including Raymond Domenech and Eric Carrière. A second panel is made up of club officials.
" We break down all the skills of a player to arrive at measurable components", notes Mr. Caillet, whose company is classified as a "young innovative company" by the State.
" We also incorporate statistical data, but our qualitative approach goes far beyond what we can see on the fields."
" A very good player is a player who is good everywhere. not only on purely sporting criteria.
Mathematical formulas, developed by the Camille Jordan research institute in Lyon, weight the results according to the nature of the position and eliminate extreme scores.
Ginkyo then compares the predicted value of each player with the actual transfer price, allowing it to further refine its criteria.
This methodology was developed in close collaboration with Ginkyo's first client, the OL. A club with the second best training center in Europe and listed on the stock exchange.
In traditional accounting, the OL workforce was "worth" 82 million euros at the end of June. Evaluated by Ginkyo, it is worth 395 million euros!
" A figure developed by a method validated by serious authorities," said Vincent Ponsot, assistant general manager of the OL. "Stats are not everything. It does not give the state of mind of the player. For me, this is the big difference with the other tools available.
Ginkyo's methodology could be duplicated in other sports, notably in rugby "where managers prefer not to invest in training and choose to recruit Fijians", with the consequences that we know on the results of the French team...
But with its limited resources, this small company of three people intends to focus first on the French Ligue 1, a few major European clubs and the English market where the culture of "fair value" accounting is much more established than in France.
" The soccer world is traditionally quite opaque. We are trying to bring transparency to it", summarizes Mr. Caillet.
