In football (soccer), more so than in sports like baseball in America, players' costs are often more in the price tag when getting the player than their wages.

In football (soccer), more so than in sports like baseball in America, players' costs are often more in the price tag when getting the player than their wages. A very good player might make £10m/yr in wages, and cost £50m to buy from a different team. Unknown players will be cheaper on both, but even if you picked them up on a one year contract and they immediately proved that their next contract should be highly paid, you've still saved a potentially huge amount on buying them before they were worth a huge signing fee. Gradually salary will catch up based on how well they play and based on the market, and the team that found this cheap player can either stop considering him a cheap player (but still be glad he came in cheaply), or can sell him on for a profit. The top 10 salaries in the premier league range from ~£10m/year to ~£15m/year, so consider that buying a top player and keeping them for 2 years can often cost £20m-£80m. If you can buy a player for cheap and pay him not a huge amount, you can afford to spend a few years turning him into a star player and still come out way ahead even if in those few years he wasn't giving you value other than turning into a better player. How long does it take for a player to become legendary? "Legendary" would normally be reserved either for the very best of the best, or on a team level based on both quality but also loyalty - as such you'd rarely see someone be called a legend before spending quite a few years at a club. But a player can go from relatively unknown to "shit he's really good" in as little as a season potentially - maybe he was playing in a league that doesn't get as much attention from countries with the bigger leagues, maybe he needed better team-mates around him to bring out his best, maybe a manager or coach helped him change his playing style very quickly, etc.