It's easier to identify a bad transfer than a good one. For starters, most transfers fail. If you pick out 20 random transfers from this summer and say, "I bet that guy doesn't even play half of the available minutes with his new team," you are going to be correct more often than not. Most soccer clubs are dumb organizations. And I'm not saying the people involved are dumb! But rather, the way these clubs are structured makes it so very few decisions get made with any kind of rigorous, objective criteria. Almost no one is talking in terms of the goals or points a new player might add and why. It's mostly still just vibes-based decision-making. That's absurd when you're spending upward of $100 million on fees that just allow you to then sign the player to an expensive long-term contract.

And it's absurd when you think about all of the different ways a given transfer could fail: The player isn't as good as you think, the coach doesn't like him, he gets hurt, his family can't adjust to the new country, you didn't properly account for league-translation issues, etc. But even beyond all of that, there's a simple heuristic to follow. A bad transfer requires only one team to make a bad decision. For a good transfer to happen -- a talented player acquired for way less than it seems like it should be -- it requires every other team to pass on the player. That means overpaying for players who don't play is way more likely than underpaying for players who become stars.

So, rather than trying to identify the best moves from this summer, I'm going to do what I did last summer and identify the transfers from this transfer window that are most likely to fail. Here are the top 11 from across Europe. How we're identifying bad transfers: For the third year in a row, we're using the basic projection system that NFL analyst Kevin Cole helped me create. We took four years' worth of top-end transfers and looked at what the player's estimated value on the site Transfermarkt was a year after the transfer. What we found, as I outlined last year: To varying degrees, a lower age, a lower transfer fee and a higher market value at the time of the transfer made it more likely there was an increase in value after a year.

Then, we can take those factors and create a formula to predict an increase or decrease in value for any big transfer. In other words: A year from now, is a player's market value likely to be higher or lower than their transfer fee, and by how much? This is a basic analysis, and it doesn't account for the extra costs of player wages, which can vary significantly. Plus, we're using estimated numbers from Transfermarkt to come up with the market values and the fees, which often contain add-ons. However, studies have found that Transfermarkt values tend to be pretty close to true player value on average, and it also lets us harness the power of the wisdom of the crowds: The market values on the site are a pretty good representation of what the world thinks of a player. At least based on our analysis, when teams have paid significantly more than the Transfermarkt value for a player, those moves have tended to not work out. Last year's top -- or bottom -- 11 included first-season Newcastle flops Nick Woltemade and Yoane Wissa, the player they were replacing in Liverpool's Alexander Isak, and Arsenal's Eberechi Eze, who played just 1,812 minutes. Looking at this summer, though, one thing immediately stands out: The price has gone up. Last year, just four players projected to have a year-out value decrease of 30% or more. This season, there are 11 -- in Europe alone. I've excluded deals from Saudi clubs, so we start in North London. 11. Mateus Fernandes, midfielder, West Ham to Tottenham Age: 21 Fee: €99 million Market value: €50 million Projected negative differential: 30.3%