Inside Line: Eden Hazard and Christian Eriksen Tip Iceberg of Expensive Mistakes

They are at the creative heart of Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. One commanded a transfer fee of £32 million when he moved to the Premier League and was recently judged the third-most valuable player on the planet at €99m. The other cost €12m to extract from the final year of a contract at Ajax Amsterdam and is now valued at three times that sum, according to the same CIES study. 

At first glance, the signings of Eden Hazard and Christian Eriksen have produced extraordinary value for the two London clubs. Yet both represent missed opportunities on an extraordinary scale. Had Chelsea and Tottenham followed up the earlier advice of their own scouting staff, the pair could have been brought to England for fees of less than £100,000 apiece.

The two scouts in question—Gwyn Williams and Paul Senior—advised their employers to take advantage of FIFA transfer regulations to recruit Hazard and Eriksen at age 16. By convincing the Belgium youth international to leave Lille, and the Dane to exit Odense BK, before signing their first professional contracts, the Premier League clubs would have had to pay a maximum of €120,000 in training compensation for each.

One irony of Chelsea's miss is that the club was using the same training compensation-based strategy on a grand scale to build up its academy under Frank Arnesen, the director of football poached from White Hart Lane. Arnesen blocked the move for Hazard because the Belgian had been proposed by Williams, a long-standing Stamford Bridge employee and ally of Jose Mourinho's. Williams was made redundant the summer after he scouted Hazard, while Arnesen continued to spend tens of millions on fees and salaries for a cohort of young foreign and English "talents," none of whom established themselves in Chelsea's first team.

Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press

Eriksen could have been at Tottenham in 2008, five years before his eventual recruitment. However in a period in which White Hart Lane was submerged in the transfer politicking between Daniel Levy, Juande Ramos and Harry Redknapp, the Eriksen recommendation became one of many made by Senior, only to be left uncompleted.

Senior says he has “personally detected and successfully recruited to professional football over 100 players currently playing Premiership, Championship and other levels of league football in the UK and abroad. Enabling his clubs to progress the Moneyball concept long before recent popularity amongst UK clubs.”

The former West Ham United and Crystal Palace youth coach claims that those footballers have generated over £225m in transfer fees.

Sang Tan/Associated Press

In 2012, Senior resigned his role as the academy scouting coordinator to take up a position at Charlton Athletic. By then Levy's right-hand man on recruitment matters was Tim Sherwood, whose self-assurance repeatedly outstrips his achievements.

As director of football at Leeds United, Williams made the club seven-figure sums on signings such as Robert Snodgrass, Luciano Becchio and Max Gradel while developing Fabian Delph and Danny Rose as first-team players. He is in the process of suing Leeds for unfair dismissal during the disastrous tenure of Bahrain bank Gulf Finance House as the Championship club's owners.

It is not just future virtuosos like Hazard and Eriksen who go undervalued by English clubs. They also misjudge the men with an eye for such talent.