How an $800k A-League player’s value rose to $33m in just seven months

If someone offered you an investment opportunity with a guaranteed return of 4025 per cent in just seven months, you’d probably do some thorough due diligence before committing to anything. If the offer came via email, it’d go straight into your spam folder.

It sounds far too good to be true - but in the case of Lucas Herrington , it’s all too real.

Herrington’s recent move to newly promoted Premier League side Hull City has been hailed as a landmark moment for Australian soccer, and a shining example of the quality of young players being developed. It also provides a sobering reminder about where A-League clubs sit in the global pecking order.

On January 3, Herrington played his last match for Brisbane Roar before being sold to Colorado Rapids for $800,000. On August 2, he played his last match for Colorado Rapids before being sold to Hull City for $24 million, with the potential for that figure to rise to $33 million with performance-related add-ons - a record for an Australian player should the full extent of the agreement be triggered. Already, after two appearances for Hull, he is being hailed in England as a shrewd signing with a huge future. He turns 19 next weekend.

Herrington did not become 41 times better at football in seven months, yet he became as much as 41 times more valuable. It’s not like Colorado taught him anything special; the skills and attributes which caught Hull’s eye were there when he was at Brisbane Roar .

All that changed is the environment in which he demonstrated them, and therefore how the market evaluated him. Part of that is because he also debuted for the Socceroos and played at a World Cup during those seven months, but a bigger part is because of how Major League Soccer is perceived.

So ... what happened? Is this definitive proof that Australian clubs are being ripped off, as fans have long believed? Why did it require another club from another country to realise Herrington’s value? Couldn’t Brisbane Roar have just cut out the middleman and sold him to Hull directly?

The answers go to the very heart of the A-League’s increasingly enthusiastic embrace of player sales as a solution to its financial problems, and the limitations of that strategy.

“It would be lovely to think that we’d be able to sell a player from Australia for US$23.5 million directly into a top-five league,” Buddy Farah, Herrington’s agent, told this masthead. “I just can’t see that happening.”

Player transfer valuations are an inexact science, but there is a way of removing the guesswork out of it. Researchers at the CIES Football Observatory have quantified the many variables that decide how much a player - any player - is sold for. Their latest statistical model, built from an analysis of 8389 transfers around the world between 2014 and 2024, can account for almost 85 per cent of the variation in transfer fees.

Of all the performance-related factors they measured - goals, minutes, results, starts, international experience - the most influential was the sporting level of the matches a player had played over the previous 12 months, or the quality of the competition those matches were played in.