What is the market price of Emile Smith Rowe?

Using comparable and similar players to estimate what a transfer fee for Smith Rowe might look like

My ongoing analysis of estimating players' transfer fees through comparable players faces its most challenging task yet with Emile Smith Rowe.

Arsenal fans would readily understand the difficulty; he enjoyed an 18-month period of significant playing time, performing admirably for his age, but subsequent injuries and an improving team have made it difficult for him to secure minutes.

This leaves us in a tough spot for where to draw lines and get comparable players from. If you use the two seasons where he has played the most you get a good sample of minutes, this is just also two season’s removed from the present time.

If you use the two most recent seasons you get a sample that is just 7.2 90s played (part of why he might be potentially sold as well) and that is really just not enough minutes to feel really comfortable about.

There is basically no good way to slice this and come out with something that makes you feel happy about your choice. Ultimately for this I am going to aim in between these and take the last year he had significant minutes and the last two season and use this as my basis for the primary analysis.

This gives us a decent sample of minutes on the field and the last two seasons are not massively overpowered by the past performance. The tradeoff here feel about as good as you can get in this imperfect world.

When you take the stats (these comparisons use over 40 different stats and the looks to minimize the absolute differences on a whole using standard deviation for Smith Rowe you get the following list.

It is a unique mix of players, some forwards, some wingers, some midfielders. This is probably about right, as Smith Rowe hasn’t really nailed down a true position and is a bit of a tweener where he is kind of all of these but also not really any of them fully either.

Using data from Transfermarkt for the estimated value and the most recent sale for the player you get the following distribution of fees for these players.

At the high end the estimate would be in the 30-60 million range and that is probably not a horrible estimate for Smith Rowe if he fulfills his promise and builds on what he has done in his first seasons when he broke through at Arsenal. I don’t think that this is a realistic price that Arsenal could expect if they were to sell now.

On the low end the estimate would be in the 5-12 million range, and while this might be a bit low on him it also might not be too far off given that he has less than 8 nineties played in the League over the last two seasons and an extensive injury record.

The middle ground here is about 15-25 range and I think this is probably where my expectations would also be in for the player in a perfect world.

The positive for a Smith Rowe sale is that he looks to be on a reasonable salary that shouldn’t be something that turns off a potential buyer. He is English and home grown which would be a positive for Premier League teams that would be interested in him.

I have touched on it already but the injury record is one that I would have some worry about if Arsenal were buying the player and this is something that would probably push down the price

I think that this exercise continues to be something that helps to set realistic expectations for a player’s value.

From this, I would set my minimum value at about 15 million pounds (the values above are in Euros from transfermarkt) and with Arsenal probably looking at asking for 25 million pounds with some bonuses.

There does seem to be interest from Premier League clubs (always a good thing when trying to get good value for a player) with Aston Villa and Fulham reportedly keen on the player, so it does seem like a move where extracting more than the minimum is possible.