Although you can never truly estimate what somebody’s transfer value is, some algorithms have given it a good try. Of course any deal will come down to how much a club wants to sell, length of contract and how much the player is pushing to leave.
Forbes unveiled their most valuable player list back in January based on a number of factors. These figures were never going to be entirely accurate but it gives an indication to how much players would have been worth at the start of the year.
Now it depends how much you trust these kinds of things, but there’s some surprising names and it looks like Man United made a complete mess of some of their transfer dealings.
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The top 100 were reported on by Football-Observatory, and it makes for some really interesting reading.
Particularly in the case of United. Forbes estimated that Romelu Lukaku was valued at €162m while Harry Maguire didn’t feature on the list at all. for reference the lowest valued player on the list came in at €55m.
Of course these values aren’t exact, but alarm bells should be ringing that The Guardian reported Lukaku was sold to Inter Milan for €80m, less than half of his supposed January value. You could argue that not signing a replacement for the Belgian has also been a catastrophic mistake for The Old Trafford side too.
It seems to be generally accepted that Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are the best players in the world, but neither feature in the top five.
They rated Kylian Mbappe as the most valuable player at €218.5m, which makes sense when you consider he looks like becoming one of the best in the world while still only being 20.
After a horrible week for Spurs, it might be safe to assume that the number two player on the list, Harry Kane, might not be worth quite as much as the €200m on this list.
These kinds of lists and values will never be the ultimate judge of a team’s transfer activity, but it’s yet another indicator over how awful the Man United board have been when it comes to the transfer market.