The RIGHT Price for Saliba

On Monday, we asked what you think the “right” price is for William Saliba. Your answers are below.

“The transfer market is out of control, but he's at least worth 125 - I feel like I'm low balling here”

“Centre halves generally are not expensive. Making him the most expensive, given his age and regular availability, seems fair, but he’s not going to go for attacking player money.”

“Replying before reading the newsletter but high level: If you think back to VVD going for £75M 7 years ago while also being older, it won’t be surprising to see Saliba go for the 100-125 range given his output, relative importance to Arsenal, their lack of any need to sell and also his availability. ”

“Fuck’s sake. Saw the title of the latest Transfer Flow email and almost hit the unsubscribe button 😭”

It’s probably useful to lay down some principles here before digging into the pricing and markets discussion.

1. The BEST footballers are luxury goods. This means their transfer fees remain detached from general market values in ways that are sometimes weird and hard to explain.

2. Very good players are more closely anchored to more recent market trends. But those trends are a smoothed distribution of years and not simply “what happened last transfer window.” In the poll responses, someone mentioned what Chelsea did in the market last summer. That had a small effect on the current market, but the bigger impact was everyone looking at Chelsea’s PSR issues this summer and thinking, “yeah, maybe don’t do that.”

3. Barring Real Madrid and maybe Bayern Munich (who run a big cash balance), at this point Premier League fees stand by themselves.

4. The football world as a whole still has a fairly predictable economy. Outside of women’s football, TV Rights are actually contracting. Ticket prices have also largely been optimised across most leagues, and further price hikes run the risk of irritating the fans and ruining the atmosphere at the ground. 20 years ago it looked very different, but nowadays it would take significant and sustained new sources of income to push transfer fees much higher.

This could be a much lengthier white paper we could charge teams for — and it may in the future — but for now, let’s dig into Big Bill with these concepts in mind.

First of all, we know Saliba is a top 5 CB in the world. There isn’t much room to disagree with the assessment at this point. We also know that he is proven against all levels of opposition, and works very well in a high possession team.

Many of you used Virgil van Dijk as a comp for your price, and while that’s probably a good place to start, it misses out on some key factors. When VVD was purchased, there was still some risk around his ability to play in a high possession team. Southampton were good, but they weren’t a CL team, and Celtic’s league quality was very soft. There is no risk around Saliba. VVD was also a few years older, Southampton didn’t have Arsenal’s firepower, and the market was less inflated then.

Some of you also argued that centrebacks shouldn’t go for more than £100M, ever. This used to be a broad perspective across the landscape, but I think the best teams have moved beyond that. They now clearly realise that, in some systems at least, a great CB is as important as a great forward and are willing to pay for it. Forward production is obvious. They score goals and create goals for teammates.

Centreback production is… also pretty obvious now. They prevent goals, but they are also some of the highest-touch players in the game, and are required to open play constantly for elite possession teams. Long switches of play to speedy wingers can be some of the highest value passes in the game, and there is real value in CB who drives forward (in the right situations). And CBs who are great in the air remain important for teams that want to score more goals from set pieces. Centrebacks also tend to have longer plateaus of performance and the best have longer careers, period.

Anyway, that all rolls up into two perspectives for me.

1) Arsenal are not selling Saliba. They know what they have and have no interest in trying to find a replacement. The only way he’s leaving is if he tried to force his way out, and that would probably be a protracted saga.

2) The right price is probably somewhere between £125M and £150M, and I lean toward the latter. His skill set, size, maturity, and durability mean there is zero risk, which is what usually lowers prices off the top of market values. He also has a long contract agreed. Thus anyone buying Saliba would likely be paying a world record fee in return for a player they feel will be a starter for a decade.

The summer that PSG bought Neymar and Mbappe and Barcelona responded insane fees for Coutinho and Dembele, media claimed we had seen a new standard in transfer fees for top players. My opinion was we were seeing some weird economic oddity caused by PSG, and there was no way football could financially support fees like this going forward. To me, those two fees would likely be huge outliers, while the market continued to rise in a fairly linear fashion.

Nowadays, I think we’re at the top of the market unless something big comes along to change it. Premier League fees are basically 2x what we see teams buy from each other on the continent, and there is very little impetus to push things higher. Even the Saudi Premier League splash looks like a one summer wonder, when the world was promised much larger disruptions last summer.

tl;dr Saliba is real good. CBs are more valuable than ever. Arsenal aren’t selling. We’ve hit the hard top of the transfer market.

—TK

News and rumours

• Yesterday the reporting on Jaden Philogene changed about six times between when we started working on the newsletter and when we sent it out. All of Everton, Aston Villa, Crystal Palace and Ipswich are still trying to sign him.

• Bild are reporting that Chelsea are trying to sign Karim Adeyemi from Dortmund, which would be a fairly high risk move. Adeyemi’s production isn’t bad on a per 90 basis and his best moments are incredible, but he’s had quite a few injuries and regularly been out of favor even when fit. He only completed 90 minutes on one occasion in the Bundesliga and one more in Champions League.

• Jadon Sancho is apparently telling Manchester United he’ll only accept a move to Juventus. He holds all the cards here — if United doesn’t work to get him the move he wants, they run the risk of paying a pissed off guy £15m+ to sit in their U23s.

• Fab says Southampton is going to sign right back Yukinari Sugawara from AZ Alkmaar for €7m, and they might be cooking. Really consistent performer at Europa/Conference league level, good passer, and an effective set piece taker too.

• Marseille is interested in Eddie Nketiah, who enters Year 5 of a polarizing debate about whether Arsenal should cash in on someone who’s never going to be The Guy or be happy to have a solid homegrown backup on the squad.

• Borussia Dortmund are set to sign Serhou Guirassy for a very reasonable €18m release clause. He ran crazy hot for Stuttgart, scoring 24 non-penalty goals from 15 npxG, but €18m for a guy with these shots in 2430 minutes is just fine by me.