Why we are obsessed with Transfermarkt

The football market is a strange thing. If for some it's just a muddle of names and mostly made-up negotiations, for someone else it's an irresistible fetish: in summer (and in January) we live on notifications, sites, blogs, scrolling and refresh until late at night, Fabrizio Romano and Gianluca Di Marzio. But above all, we talk about Transfermarkt. The directory portal of all the world's footballers, teams and coaches has reached a level of authority and prestige never seen before for an open source of soccer, capable of being a reference point for both insiders and fans who want to check a few names read in the papers. Starting out as a blog for nerds, it is now used by sports directors in all categories (Toronto's president said he found out who Insigne was there) and is one of the most popular non-institutional portals in sports, with a story ready for a TV documentary.  

Hamburg, May 2000. Matthias Seidel, a German computer engineer and a huge Werder Bremen fan, is away in the city on some tasks assigned to him by his advertising agency. Crossing his professional activity with his passion for football, he manages to create the beta form of what years later will be our Transfermarkt, which at the time corresponded to a portal capable of containing all the information about his favorite team. The simple reason was that 120 kilometers away Seidel could not fully follow the affairs of Werder - at a time when, of course, the Internet did not have the pervasiveness to which we are accustomed. So, as he explained himself in an interview with an Austrian website in 2008, he began to post information and data about Werder on a blog, receiving dozens of emails and reviews that would lead him to open a first dedicated fan forum. In a small amount of time the site becomes an open source where users enter data about the players and teams they follow. "At the beginning we had 50 to 100 visitors a day and I said to myself: it can't be true that there are so many crazy people! At the 2006 World Cup there were about 450,000 per day," Seidel explained. Data-driven football, before Billy Beane and Moneyball. 

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Transfermarkt over the years grows-as do the web services-and reaches, step by step, more and more worldwide contributors, reliable geeks who spend three or four hours in front of their laptops completing spreadsheets on Excel. It retains the model of the early 2000s, but grows in size and audience. After two World Cups and two European Championships, in 2008, German publisher Axel Springer buys a 51 percent stake in Transfermarkt, brings in a team of computer developers, an editorial team that takes care of article and text aspects, and brings in other professionals. Today, the site has hundreds of volunteers worldwide, some 80 employees, and has web versions for 22 different countries. It covers the value and bio of about 800,000 football professionals. 

Twenty-one years after its creation, what has become of Transfermarkt for us fanatics? The site maintains its rigid and very schematic aesthetic, confirming its desire to remain a portal for insiders. At times, it feels like navigating through Football manager screens, at times like being on the homepage of a blog. The aesthetics are stark, but the graphic quality is essential and precise. Over the years, the portal has modernized, grown in content and information, but it has not abandoned the essential austere tone of strong quantitative impact: numbers, not explanations, are provided, allowing for comparisons of data and profiles of professionals in each category and country.

The project's growth process has also advanced naturally on social media, with an Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter profile for the various national portals; the international one has 7.3 million followers and has a feed that updates with the main market rumors or players' profiles and careers. Among the latest, to give an example, one can find Neymar's market CV, Barcelona's possible lineup for next season, or Kalvin Phillips' Done deal from Leeds to Manchester City (with market value and figures of the negotiation). There has also been for some time the TikTok channel, where the same communications and posts are reposted with trends, memes, and viral hits. 

Such authority and tone of voice that on social media they annoyed even Cristiano Ronaldo, who in 2020 blocked their profiles on Instagram after a (in his opinion) downward evaluation. Transfermarkt's brand reputation seems never to have stopped and indeed has grown, year after year, to become, as Rory Smith wrote in the New York Times, capable of influencing the soccer market itself. Managers and coaches, presidents and sporting directors, all consult Transfermarkt like the Treccani when naming a player. Although the price of a player's price tag is decided by prosecutors and managers during a negotiation, Transfermarkt has been pushed further by insiders, specifically citing it as a reference in negotiations. Yet in an interview with the Dutch site Follow the money, the current head of the project specified, "Clubs should not make transfer decisions based on the figures on our website." Too late.