What Should Real Madrid Pay For Big Bill Saliba?

Greetings, humans. Happy Monday. Euros semifinals are now set, with the entirely unexpected fixtures of Spain vs. France and England vs. The Netherlands taking place midweek.

Meanwhile in America, the semifinals of the Copa America are Argentina vs Canada (coached by Jesse Marsch?) and Colombia vs Uruguay (coached by Marcelo Bielsa), after URU knocked out Brazil in penalties.

William Saliba is probably one of the top 5 centrebacks in football right now. This is not just our opinion or the opinion of Arsenal fans, he’s also one of the starters in the absolutely loaded French National Team, and the rumour mill has started to blow hotter around a potential move to Real Madrid.

He has been excellent since his age 19 season, and probably spent at least one too many seasons on loan before Mikel Arteta realised he was more than good enough to anchor the Arsenal backline for the next decade. In addition to being big, strong, fast, and rarely making mistakes, he also rarely misses games.

Anyway, since the rumour mill brought it up last week, our question here is this…

Assume Arsenal were open to selling [they definitely are not]: What should you pay in the transfer market for a 23-year-old CB who is among the top 5 in the world at his position?

One of the principles that StatsBomb the website was founded on was sharing the best analysis work from around the internet. We’re going to carry that forward at times over here as well.

We’ve been impressed by McKay Johns’ work in recent years. He’s provided a wealth of learning resources and good advice, including tutorials for analytics in python and a lot of learning about webscraping. He’s also absolutely correct that most of the technical skills you need to learn for sports analytics also translate to well-paid jobs in the real world. His Substack can be found here.

Two of the OGs in football analytics are Mike Goodman and Michael Caley. They run a freemium model podcast over at The Double Pivot that has been around for ages now. Caley’s work in football analytics was a big deal at the time, with coaches like Roger Schmidt taking notice of his analysis and visualisations, and the discipline was worse off for the fact that his focus went elsewhere and has rarely returned. But the world was probably better off, because he seems to do a lot of work in grassroots politics these days.

Grace Robertson used to write for the StatsBomb blog back when it had more of a content focus. She then transitioned that into a successful paid analysis blog and Discord community. She currently has quite a few more readers than we do, but we’re going to champion work we like, whether they are bigger or smaller than TTF throughout our lifetime.

—TK

Rumours and News

• Leny Yoro wants a move to Real Madrid. I’m trying to wrap my head around being 18 and having most of Europe’s football giants try to woo you to play for them. Arsenal got pretty lucky to nab Saliba when they did.

• Juventus are suddenly a busy name in the transfer market. They have important outgoings they need to shift (Federico Chiesa), but clearly also have needs and the rumour mill has them looking at players like Jakub Kiwior (on loan), and Atalanta’s Teun Koopmeiners. Koopmeiners was highly regarded coming out of AZ Alkmaar, where he was more a complete midfielder than the purer attacking role he’s playing at Atalanta. I quite respect Thiago Motta, but Juve’s recruitment has been a disasterclass for something like a decade now. It turned out magic money did not, in fact, grown on Turin trees.

• There has been an uptick in Saudi links the last two weeks, especially for Man City players, which is only weird because there’s also been confirmation the Saudi league is unlikely to spend big this summer as they are now, and we quote, “so totally over that.”

• Meanwhile, Manchester United have given Bruno Fernandes permission to talk to Saudi teams. The same Bruno who is 29, and has a longish contract at Manchester United with a team option.

• Zirkzee is definitely going to United now. Unless Dan Ashworth steps in directly from his garden and says, “absolutely not.” Which is a thing that could happen. Milan are also rumoured to have ongoing interest, but even the lower €10M commission is too much for them.

• “Many teams are interested in Arsenal fullback Cedric Soares.” Translation: Cedric’s agent is doing his job and would LIKE many teams to be interested in Cedric so they can both get paid more.

• In a deal that feels 100% like transfer deja vu, West Ham are apparently interested in Villarreal forward Alexander Sorloth. Sorloth was proooooobably the best pure CF in Spain last season, and regular podcast guess Ravi Ramineni would like you to know that Sorloth did NOT take penalties en route to scoring 23 goals in La Liga last season, while Dovbyk had 7 pens and 17 NPGs for a total of 24.

• Real Madrid are confident they can beat Barcelona to the signature of Florian Wirtz. That one feels new.

• Alvaro Morata is weighing up a move to AC Milan. The same Alvaro Morata who has not underscored his expected goals since he left the Premier League. He’s been at par or better for g=xG since 2019 on StatsBomb’s expected goals numbers. Stick that in your narrative pipe and smoke it.