#Footballindex - Investing in Clubs.

When I first traded on the stock exchange, the first few trades I made were in football teams and football related retail brands, as they were what I knew about. As we see the sudden emergence and development of certain teams/clubs

often following a stagnant period of mid table finishes, or promotion to the top division, I've been contemplating the idea of investing in a team rather than an individual within a team. Over recent years, we've seen teams such as Wolves, Sheffield United, Lille, Reims,

Rennes and Atalanta emerge from their respective second divisions, or a period of mid table finishes, to finish in Europa and Champions League spots.

Of course, from an FI perspective, a team moving from a (non-PB) second division up to Champions League football within a couple of years would add huge value to their players, without even considering who the players are.

This change would add value to players from an FI standpoint in the form of - playing in PB league, more wins/goals adds to PB performance, transfer away from team to better club, European football adds more PB days, increased MB chance and so on.

So, I wanted to look into some historic data to back my idea of FI value increasing as the team develops. I originally thought FI did 3 year price graphs, but realised it was only 1 year, and as I don't have access to any histrocial prices past 1 year, i had to look into

teams that had vastly improved since the start of this season. Therefore, with risk of slightly less representative data, I decide to look at Rennes, who finished 10th in 18/19 and 3rd in 19/20.

Of the core 14 players throughout the 19/20 season, there was an average price increase of 48%, with just one player (Tait) who did not increase in price, and just 4 players (Tait, Nzonzi, Da Silva, Bourigeaud) who didn't achieve 10%+ growth across the season - excluding divs.

The growth was heavily weighted towards the younger members of the team, with the 5 players achieving 40%+ growth having an average age at the end of the season of 22.8 years - Mendy brought up the average age considerably but his growth must be heavily accredited to GK divs.

The French league has had a series of teams shooting up the division, due to their young hungry squads. We can see this on multiple occasions:
- Monaco 16/17 (Mbappe/Mendy/Bakayoko)
- Lille 18/19 (Mendes/Ikone/Pepe)
- Rennes 19/20 (Camavinga/Raphinha/Maouassa)

As for the next clubs to follow this trend, my predictions will come soon in a separate tweet.

This thread shows how predicting a team to perform well can be as beneficial as predicting individuals, and may return better long term growth as the team grows, rather than an individual returning dividends over a season alone.