£100 million for Kaka – crazy? Look at the Maths…

It is widely reported that Zinedine Zidane cost around £46 million pounds when he moved from Juventus to Real Madrid in 2001.

In 2001 the Euro : Sterling exchange rate was around 0.6:1

£46m / 0.6 = €77m

Now, that was over 7 years ago.  That’s quite a while in the economic world of inflation.

I could do the inflation calculations myself, but it would be time consuming and dull, a quick Google search finds lots of sites such as http://www.moneysorter.co.uk/calculator_inflation.html.  (I should really have done this in Euros, but couldn’t find a converter, so used GBP inflation.)

As you can see, this gives us a value of €89 million.

Using today’s exchange rate of €:£ = 0.93:1 this gives us €89m * 0.93 = £82.7m.  Not so far away from the £100 million figure quoted so much in the press over recent weeks!

Bearing in mind Kaka is 26 and Zidane was 30 this seems a fair offer in comparison.

So there you go, seemed absurd, but not so different from the past after all.  Maths makes sense of the headlines!

(I’m still glad it didn’t happen though!)