- By Tony Attwood
- Arsenal six new transfer targets and seven transfer updates
- The Arsenal squad in depth: who stays and how long are the contracts
The Football Observatory has published a list of the most valuable players across the world and Arsenal have a player at number 14. He is the third English player in the list, and he is of course, Bakayo Saka.
Top of the list is Lamine Yamal at Barcelona who is valued at €402m, which is 60% more than Erling Haaland who is valued at €239.6m and who is in second place.
The top English player is Jude Bellingham valued at €233.8m and the top Arsenal player is, as mentioned, Bukayo Saka valued at €115.1m. In terms of players who are playing for English clubs, Erling Haaland is of course top valued, followed by Cole Palmer and then Saka in third, followed closely by Morgan Rogers of Aston Villa. And interestingly if we take the top 20 players in England by value in the chart just those four (Bellingham, Palmer, Saka, Rogers) can play for England. And indeed just four are actually playing in England (Haaland, Palmer, Saka, Rogers).
The next player on the list who is qualified for England is Declan Rice now valued at €100m.
But now, focussing instead on the clubs rather than the players, we have in the top ten, three of these playing for Manchester City and two playing for each of Arsenal and Chelsea. As for the rest of the top ten Aston Villa, Newcastle and Liverpool have just one each.
In fact the first player for an English club in this list of players ranked by value, who is not with one of the five clubs already mentioned is Rasmus Höjlund with Manchester United. He comes in at number 23 in the chart. At number 25 is Carlos Baleba at Brighton, and at number 28 is Ilya Zabarnyi at Bournemouth.
This really does make the point that the teams at or near the top of the league are buying in or nurturing players of great ability and value. And this of course then means that more and more players are applying for a place in their youth teams, to become part of such clubs. Thus the situation perpetuates itself: the clubs get better, and so attract a higher quality of youth trainees, and so get better, and so…
It also shows a value in buying Declan Rice which is not normally considered. Of course he was expensive, and of course he has repaid his cost many times over on the pitch. But there is more to it than that, for just by being an Arsenal player he helps represent Arsenal as one of the very top Premier League clubs, which helps attract more fans across the world supporting Arsenal, but also attracts more young playerrs who want to try to be trained where Saka was trained and where he and Rice are playing.
And then here is another interesting point. After Saka and Rice the third most valuable Arsenal player according to the chart is Kai Havertz – valued at €91.1m – which is interesting because so many bloggers and their chums in the media are saying that Arsenal need to buy a new centre forward and ditch Havertz.
In Premier League terms, according to the normally quite reliable Football Observatory fitgures, only Isak at Newcastle and of course Haaland at ManC are worth more than Havertz. So maybe all this talk of rushing out to get another centre forward, because if we don’t we’ll never win anything, is actually being cooked up by the usual anti-Arsenal journos who are increasingly anxious to get Havertz to want to leave.
Overall, the 20 most valuable players in the Premier League, according to the Football Observatory chart, come from just six clubs: Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea, Newcastle, Aston Villa, and Liverpool.
In terms of Arsenal players, the most valuable men we have (again according to this chart) are, with the values accorded to them by the website we’ve been quoting throughout…
- Bukayo Saka: €115.1m
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Declan Rice €100.0m
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Kai Havertz: €91.1m
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Gabriel Martinelli €87.0m
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William Saliba €83.3m
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Martin Ödegaard €68.7m
Now the chart takes into account just 40 players who are playing with English clubs, and, as I have noted, it lists them by the value that they assign to each player. Six of those 40 are with Arsenal. So what of the rest?
- Manchester City: 7 players
- Arsenal: 6 players
- Chelsea: 6 players
- Liverpool: 5 players
- Brighton and Hove Albion: 4 players
- Bournemouth: 3 players
- Aston Villa: 2 players
- Manchester United: 2 players
- Newcastle United: 2 players
- Tottenham Hotspur: 1 player
This shows the remarkable achievements of Brighton and Bournemouth, neither of whom have vast sums to spend on players, and yet have between them in their squads seven of the 40 most valuable players in the League. Compare this with Manchester United and Tottenham Hots who between them, have three such players!
Tottenham, we may conclude, may well sack one manager and bring in another every year or so, but that doesn’t bring them in highly valued players. In fact the reason Tottenham have only one highly valued player in the Football Observatory list is primarily because they keep spending all their money on changing managers. Which players want to come to a team where they have no idea who the manager will be in three months time? Only those who are desperate to move on.
