Ronaldo, Neymar, Zlatan: The 25 most overpriced transfers for forwards in football history

Darwin Nunez is the name on everybody’s lips right now after completing a move to Liverpool for an initial fee of £64 million this week.

According to the BBC, the fee paid by the Premier League giants could rise to £85 million, which would see them shatter the previous high watermark of £75 million that they forked out for Virgil van Dijk.

All in all, it’s a transfer fee that has turned thousands upon thousands of heads with some fans arguing that Liverpool have paid over the odds for a player yet to prove themselves at the highest level on a consistent basis.

Truth be told, the ‘look, Liverpool are just like Manchester City’ narrative is pretty darn flimsy, but there’s no denying that the Reds have put their money where their mouth is in a summer that will see them lose Sadio Mane.

And time will ultimately tell whether Nunez – who put pen to paper on a six-year deal – will prove to be an investment too far for Jurgen Klopp’s men as he starts to plot his adaptation to Premier League football.

However, regardless of how things might actually turn out on the pitch, the simple fact of the matter is that the Nunez deal isn’t as overpriced as some people are making it out to be from an objective point of view too.

And we know that because the data gurus at Transfermakt have a brilliant tool where you can compare the fee paid for a player against their estimated transfer value at the time of the move.

In other words, you can statistically work out how ‘overpriced’ or ‘underpriced’ a move really was, and Liverpool’s swoop for Nunez is only ranked as the 26th-most overpriced deal for a forward in football history.

That’s not exactly the bum deal that some fans are suggesting that it is, right?

Well, yes, but let’s look at the