A player’s value is a finger-in-the-air figure, says Grégory Schneider, head of sport at the French daily Libération: there is no market price, and what a player is worth is whatever you hope to sell him on for.

There are ways to value plenty of assets, but footballers aren’t one of them. Still, the various public estimates (Transfermarkt, Football Manager, etc.) tend to converge. For about ten years, the CIES Football Observatory, a Swiss research centre, has had its own valuation method, whose results are now behind a paywall. Crucially, though, the CIES says it only counts contracts of 3 years or more.

The institute’s academic team has nonetheless explained its method several times: age, performance, position, track record, etc. Its estimates at the time (in French) turned out to be fairly accurate when the transfers later happened.

These valuations are also handy for clubs up for sale: they push the price up.

Since 2017, the iconic club of Saint-Étienne has been up for sale. Its owners, the ageing duo Romeyer and Caïazzo, at war with more or less everyone, are looking for a buyer. Lazard, picked over Rothschild, brings in Peak6, an investor in several sports teams. The offer: €50M. Problem: buyers and sellers alike have oversized egos, and the sale falls through.

The following year, the club is up for sale at €20M, a little less than the price of Toulouse (€25M) and far less than Nice (€100M). Because in reality you don’t just buy the club… you also take on its debts and invest. That’s roughly €150M just to get a seat at the table.

But to talk up the club and pass it off as a hidden gem, the duo puts together a pitch deck showcasing… the players. Several slides are devoted to the youngsters, and above all to their potential capital gains.

Problem: 2 years later, not one of those players has been sold at the price on the slide. Shame.

And to this day, the club still hasn’t been sold.