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Ueda's Cheap Transfer Fee Exposes the Eredivisie's Fallen Value

original Football

On August 30, Feyenoord played Den Haag. Ayase Ueda scored in his third consecutive match.

After the game, he swapped shirts on the pitch with teammate Tsuyoshi Watanabe. Not an opponent from a rival club — a teammate.

That night he flew to France, and on the 31st he underwent his medical. The transfer fee to Lille was €15 million. Roughly $2.8 million (¥28 billion) in Japanese yen.

Wait — let me recheck that figure.

Last season’s Eredivisie top scorer, for $2.8 million (¥28 billion).

Isn’t that cheap?

He’s Japan’s national team ace, a player who went to the World Cup, and the buying club plays in the Champions League. That’s the price? I was surprised.

Several reasons came to mind — his age, 28; no track record in Europe’s top five leagues; his being Japanese. None of them felt like the decisive factor.

After researching and thinking it through, the answer that finally clicked into place was somewhere else entirely.

It isn’t Ueda who’s cheap. It’s the title “Eredivisie top scorer” itself that has collapsed in value.

First, confirm this price isn’t an anomaly

The negotiation history from this summer is on record.

Feyenoord initially demanded more than €35 million. Everton offered €23 million, and there talks stalled. In the end, nobody from the Premier League paid the asking price.

What finally closed was €15 million.

That’s less than half of what the seller wanted. This isn’t the buyer haggling. The market as a whole refused to pay that price.

So is this €15 million level historically low?

Line up transfer fees for players who held the same title.

Flat in nominal terms over ten years.

During this period, Europe’s transfer market expanded significantly. A flat nominal figure means the real value fell to less than half.

In other words, $2.8 million isn’t a sudden discount. It’s the endpoint of a decade-long decline.

Why did it fall? The answer lies in post-transfer performance

What happened after Eredivisie top scorers moved to the top five leagues?

The most recent case stings the most.

Santiago Gimenez scored 65 goals in 105 official matches for Feyenoord before moving to Milan. Transfer fee: €32 million.

His tally at Milan: 7 goals in 37 matches. Zero goals in Serie A in the 2025-26 season.

That’s Ueda’s predecessor.

Buyers are looking at this list. That’s why the price falls. So far, this is simply the market having correctly learned from experience.

Even the “success stories” have dropped sharply in number

It wouldn’t be fair to line up only failures here. Look at the players considered successes.

Viktor Gyökeres scored 68 goals in 66 matches in Portugal before moving to Arsenal. The transfer fee was €65.76 million plus €10.26 million in add-ons. In the 2025-26 season he scored 14 Premier League goals and 21 across all competitions, becoming the team’s top scorer as Arsenal won the league title.

By any measure, a success. He delivered value for the price.

Even so, his league goal tally fell from 39 to 14. A retention rate of 36%.

Darwin Núñez follows the same shape. 26 goals in 28 league matches at Benfica. Liverpool bought him for £75 million [translator’s note: figure as given], and over three years he scored 40 goals in 143 matches. He won a title medal, but was then sold to Al-Hilal for £53 million [translator’s note: figure as given]. He lost his starting spot there too, and this summer was loaned out, without a purchase option, to newly promoted Al-Diriyah.

In other words, this kind of transfer isn’t a binary of “hit” or “miss.” Everyone shifts downward together. And within that, the downside tail is long.

Buyers demanding a discount is a rational response to this distribution.

Go back further than Suárez, and the picture changes

So far this has been a story about the title’s credibility falling. But when, and how much, was that credibility actually there?

I went back through the list of Eredivisie top scorers.

Cruyff. Van Basten (four years running). Romário (three years running). Bergkamp (three years running). Litmanen. Ronaldo. Van Nistelrooy. Kežman. Huntelaar. And Suárez.

Three of them are Ballon d’Or winners. Cruyff three times, Van Basten three times, Ronaldo twice.

The winners across the 16 seasons since 2010: Vlaar [translator’s note: name uncertain, kept as closest], Dost, Bony, Finnbogason, Depay, Janssen, Jørgensen, Jahanbakhsh, Luuk de Jong, Berghuis, Deceuninck [uncertain], Jakupović [uncertain], Arrel [uncertain], Dovikas [uncertain], Xavi Simons, Pavlidis, Stengs [uncertain], Ueda.

Zero of them. Suárez was the last one.

Counted it out, and it wasn’t as extreme as expected

Let’s check this impression against the numbers.

First, age. Ronaldo became top scorer at 18, Van Basten between 19 and 22, Bergkamp between 21 and 23. Recently, meanwhile, Haller was 27, Jakupović [uncertain] 26, Luuk de Jong as old as 33, and Ueda 27.

Tallying it up:

A rise of 1.5 years.

Honestly, this gap is smaller than expected. Even in the 1990s there were Luc Nilis (28, 29) and Van Hooijdonk (32). Top scorers’ ages have always been spread wide.

However, comparing the 1980s through the early 1990s (21.9 years old) with the last 12 seasons (25.1 years old) gives a gap of 3.2 years. My conclusion is only that a trend exists.

Age of Eredivisie top scorers at season’s end. The black line is a 5-season moving average.

What came through more clearly than age was the goal count.

A 17% decline.

Crucially, the league’s overall goal count hasn’t fallen. Goals per match: 2.92 in 2009-10, 3.24 in 2023-24, 2.99 in 2024-25, 3.18 in 2025-26. Flat, if anything slightly up.

The top scorer’s goal count has fallen, while the league’s per-match average has stayed flat.

Goals themselves haven’t disappeared from the league. What’s disappeared is the single player who monopolizes them.

The age at which the cream gets skimmed off has dropped

Why did the monopolizer disappear? Line up the age at which players win the scoring title against the age at which talent leaves the league, and it becomes clear.

Once, the league’s best player stayed in the league. Van Basten was at Ajax until 22. Bergkamp until 24. Cruyff until 26. Romário spent five seasons at PSV.

Not anymore. De Ligt left the league at 19, Frenkie de Jong at 21, Antony at 22, Hakim Ziyech [translator’s note: name uncertain, kept as closest] at 23.

In other words, the top scorer title has become an award that goes to whoever is left after the cream has been skimmed off. By the time the tally is taken, the league’s best player is already gone.

This is what it means for the title “Eredivisie top scorer” to have had its contents swapped out. It used to point to Europe’s best young talent. Now it points to “whoever scored the most among the players not yet sold.”

The cause is simpler than that: Dutch clubs can no longer hold onto their players. Eredivisie has fallen to sixth in the UEFA rankings. The financial subsidence came first; the brand decline of the title is its downstream result.

Buyers know this structure. That’s why they’ll only pay $2.8 million.

Adding Ueda’s individual circumstances

Now that the structural story is done, add the individual factors.

Ueda’s Eredivisie scoring record looks like this:

Career total: 40 goals in 82 matches. Not a career built up steadily, but a single-season spike at age 27.

Compared with Gyökeres, the difference is visible. Gyökeres produced two consecutive seasons of anomalous output in Portugal before extracting €66 million. Ueda has one season. Same age bracket, same caliber of league, and a gap of more than fourfold, off by just one year.

Given the collapse in the title’s value as a baseline, it’s the thickness of the record that’s creating this gap.

There’s a way around it. It just takes time

So is there no path for a B-tier league’s top scorer to reach the upper tier of the top five leagues? There is. It’s a two-stage approach.

Lille, as a club, has made a business out of exactly this.

Victor Osimhen moved from Belgium’s Charleroi to Lille for €12 million, and one season later was sold to Napoli for €70 million. With that money, Lille acquired Jonathan David from Belgium’s Gent for a club-record €30 million. He struggled in the first half of the season but exploded in the second half and led the team to the league title.

Fire the first shot in a B-tier league, the second shot at a mid-tier club. This path exists.

But look at the ages of the players who walked this path. Osimhen was 21, David 20. They had two to three years at the mid-tier club to take their second shot.

Ueda is 28. Even if his second shot comes at Lille two years from now, he’ll be 30 by then. Whatever the market pays for the next step will have fallen even further from there.

So evaluating Ueda’s career on whether a call comes from a bigger club is probably missing the point.

Close

I started from the discomfort I felt at the $2.8 million price tag, and landed on the fact that the contents of the title had been swapped out.

Eredivisie top scorer used to be an award won by Cruyff, Van Basten, Ronaldo. Now it’s an award decided among whoever remains after the cream has been skimmed off. Buyers know this, and the price accurately reflects that knowledge.

That said, I don’t view this transfer pessimistically.

Holding down a starting spot at a Ligue 1 club that plays in the Champions League — as a landing point at age 28, that’s not bad at all. Lille’s front line has 39-year-old Giroud, and Ueda will be competing with him for a starting spot.

A low price means low expectations. Janssen, at £18.6 million, was expected to rival Kane. Núñez, at £64 million [translator’s note: figure as given], was expected to be a superstar.

What’s being asked of Ueda is far lighter than that.

The fact that the title has been valued cheaply is, in itself, protecting the player. Ironic, but not a bad thing.

References

On the figures

The age graph shows the estimated age of each season’s top scorer at the end of that season. In years with multiple co-winners, the average was taken. The goals graph uses each winner’s goal tally as-is, overlaid with a 5-season moving average. The underlying data in both cases comes from Wikipedia’s list of historical top scorers.

This piece was drafted and directed by Kuzuryu, written by AI.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/09/1783/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.