Last year’s player of the year nominees cost more than twice as much as this year’s bunch

Thanks to Jamie Vardy's record-breaking exploits earlier in the season, we've been hearing plenty of the it just shows there's still value to be had in the transfer market debate in recent months.

With the PFA's six nominations for their Player of the Year award now common knowledge, it was inevitable that someone was going to strike up the same discussion sooner or later, so to hell with it, why not let it be us to kick things off? We've had a look at the most recent transfer fees paid for this year's PFA POTY award nominations and compared it with the sums forked out for their 2015 counterparts, and as you'd expect, there's a tidy old difference. If it weren't for £42.5m Mesut Ozil making the 2016 list, the difference would be even more impressive. Altogether, the reported fees paid for Ozil, N'Golo Kanté (£5.6m), Dimitri Payet (£10m), Jamie Vardy (£1m) and Riyad Mahrez (£400,000) total £59.5m. Obviously, this doesn't include Spurs' own Harry Kane. That's an average of £9.92m per player. In 2015, Kane was also one of the nominees. The reported fees stumped up for the remaining five nominations - Chelsea duo Diego Costa and Eden Hazard (£32m each), Alexis Sanchez (£35m), Philippe Coutinho (£8.5m) and David De Gea (£17.8m) - adds up to £125.3m, and average of £20.9m. Incredibly, as all you mathematical geniuses have no doubt already worked out, the figures have been halved in just 12 months. 2015/2016, the season of the shrewd buy.