Who Is Football’s Hottest Property Right Now?

As the 2017/18 draws ever closer with the Premier League beginning in less than three weeks, players returning to preseason and ending their holidays abroad enjoying the very best restaurants and parties, who’s to know what players will prove to be most valuable to their clubs. However, as we all know we’re still in the transfer season which brings a new, but not so different meaning to the value of a player to a club. Some points that’ll come into the value of a player aside from their ability would be what they can actually bring to a club and down at Soccerex they’ve found the five most valuable under 21’s in the world.

Using Prime Time Sport’s Football Value Index for their study, Soccerex managed to narrow down the most valuable players to these hot prospects of last season:

To reach the result of Dele Alli beating the likes of Champions League winner Marco Asensio and Kylian Mbappe who’s been linked with Real Madrid, Arsenal and PSG, they take many factors into consideration. These factors include the player’s age, position, current club, contract length, market value perception, international caps, minutes played, goals, injuries and technical quality from a variety of sources to arrive at a final valuation.

So if you had to double take when seeing Alli was top of the list here’s what would have set him apart. Being the oldest of the five players the Tottenham midfielder could be considered as a more mature, consistent option having had two full seasons performing well in the Premier League and winning back to back Young Player of the Year awards. This also covers the minutes played aspect which blows Mbappe out of consideration with Alli playing more than double the 18-year old’s minutes with 3,044 compared to 1,499.

If you were wondering why his value is almost double Marco Asensio then you could compare their international careers. Alli has racked up 19 caps and two goals for England since 2015 while Asensio has only played three times for Spain’s first team but there’s no doubt that number will increase over the next year, especially with the World Cup on the horizon.

One thing that also sticks out is the every player stretching back to the top 10 came from a European club, including Marcus Rashford of Manchester United. This shows just how strong Europe’s top five leagues are even at a level regarding such young players. With the popularity of the European game spanning across the world, this sees more money come in for these clubs to help nurture their young talent into becoming world beaters, a prime example in recent times being Lionel Messi trading Newell’s Old Boys for Barcelona at the tender age of 13.

With these players still very early into their careers alongside the inflated prices of today’s transfer market, it’s scary to think how much these values can rise to in the near future. But with these values on the up could this eventually see players become invaluable to their clubs and stay for much longer spells like Messi has done with Barcelona? Maybe we’ll go into that a bit deeper on another day but if you’d like to read Soccerex’s full report have a look at their website.