Derivatives trading in football players

I love it! It’s a dream come true!! It’s official!!!

Football clubs have finally wisened up to trading in derivatives on players’ contracts, it is apparent based on the transfer deadline news of yesterday. Alvaro Negredo has been loaned out by Manchester City to Valencia, but at the end of the year Valencia have an obligation to make the deal permanent. The same article mentions Fiorentina taking Micah Richards on loan, also from Manchester City. In this case, however, Fiorentina has the option to make the deal permanent after a year.

In fact, thinking about it, this kind of option trading in football contracts is not all that new. When Brendan Rodgers was initially appointed by Liverpool in 2012, he was given a three year deal, with the club having an option of extending it by a year (the deal has since been revised).

It’s all very interesting. I’ve constantly lamented that some of the great concepts in finance which are well applicable to everyday life are not applied to the extent that is required. Option valuation is one such concept, for example. I wrote to a friend just now asking why I should join a club he is exhorting me to join, given it’s not doing much now. His reply can be condensed to “option value”.

Option valuation is not the only thing. There is the concept of liquidity. A very commonly used concept within financial markets, it is surprisingly absent in general economic literature. For example, in finance it is a well understood concept that the more the number of active market participants the less is the transaction cost (measured as the bid-ask spread). The same concept can be used to analyze markets for taxis, housing, cooks (why a cook costs much more in Rajajinagar where demand is much lower than in Jayanagar), etc. You never see too many economists talking about it, though.

The problem might be that practitioners of financial economics concepts find finance too lucrative to apply their concepts elsewhere, while mainstream or left-leaning economists might find finance (especially complex derivative finance) abhorrent, and thus are loathe to borrow concepts from that (generally speculating)!

In terms of liquidity, though, things seem to be changing. My old friend Sangeet has been practically making a living over the last couple of years evangelizing the concept of liquidity, through his excellent blog on platform economics. Check out his recent post on Uber, for example. Platform economics is nothing but the economics of liquidity. The success of Sangeet’s blog shows that people are finally beginning to take the concept seriously. Still not mainstream economists, though!

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