This week has seen an inordinate amount of articles and analysis about where Lionel Messi will be playing next year, with more interest on his release clause value than the fact that the contract was pretty clear that he wasn’t going anywhere.
This did lead me to wonder, if this is the season for outlandish speculation then how much would it cost to assemble a Superteam of the best players across Europe?
The first question was who would make it into the team? To avoid any bias I needed an objective scouting process, so I turned to the Ballon D’or Power Rankings for 2020. Like a playground kick-about I selected players for each position with highest ranked player fitting into each position.
This led to the immediate problem of being spoilt for choice upfront, and in the end it was Neymar who lost out, being ranked behind Lewandowski, Ronaldo and Messi. I also ended up with quite an attacking midfield, of Kevin DeBryune, Kylian Mbappe and Serge Gnabry.
The other problem was that as usual it is the strikers who get all the attention and I couldn’t fill my back line as there were not enough defenders in the Power Rankings (and I’m going to need some good defenders based on my attack minded midfield). To the keep the objectivity going I turned to player rankings from the CIES Football Observatory and filled the final few spots on my team from the highest ranked player for that position.
The CIES rankings are based on OptaPro data and place a lot of emphasis on recent form of the player and team, which is my only explanation for how Harry Maguire made it into my Super team!
Finally, for goalkeepers I used the Four Four Two ratings, which put Jan Oblak ahead of Liverpool’s Alisson.
So how much will it cost me?
Now that I had my prospects, I needed to value them. There are a number of websites that do this but I went with CIES since the web browser was already open. Using their valuation I could work out that the team would cost 1.05 billion euros to assemble.
Of course, this has been the week of the release clause, so I had to check which players had a release clause in their contract, and how much was it. When this is added to the equation (five players have a release clause) the acquisition cost rose to 1.85 billion euros.
So my Superteam shown below will cost around two billion euros to bring together, and that’s before I start paying them. I don’t think I’ll be able to get this through Financial Fair Play!
Players valuations (with any release clause in brackets)
Sport.dat 