The English Premier League's Fantasy Football game has been used on this blog previously to explain economic issues such as opportunity cost and trade-offs. With inflation now raging in the the UK, and around the globe, the performance of Manchester City's newly signed Erling Haaland can give us a timely example of the problem.
With just two months of the new season played, Haaland's performance on the pitch has been nothing short of remarkable. The Norwegian striker has scored 15 goals in just 9 games, and is 7 clear of 2nd placed Harry Kane. Haaland delivers a goal or assist every 42 minutes - that is impressive output.
This is great news for all Fantasy Football players that have Haaland in their team. Goals earn points and Haaland is regularly scoring into double figure. In fact, he has amassed 102 points already in the game, an average of more than 11 per game week. These points can then be doubled if Haaland is selected as "game week captain".
The crowd has spoken. As of now, 84.3% of teams in the game have selected Haaland. That is 8.97 million of the 10.64 million players. Not only that, almost everyone is now captaining Haaland.. So effectively, with the exception of about 15% of players, everyone else is playing with 10 players plus Haaland.
When Haaland scores and I check my points that total looks impressive. A quick check of others brings me back down to earth. Everyone has Haaland. Everyone has him as captain. In gameweek his captaincy rate rose to 98.81%. The Norwegian is simply inflating everyone's score.
In today's inflationary spiral, fear of inflationary psychology are influencing central bankers, particularly the ECB. The days of quantitative easing are a distant memory and the solution of inflation is the raising of the price of money (interest rates) rather than the printing press. If everyone gets something, all boats should rise the same, and the difference remains.
Haaland is demonstrating this on a weekly basis.