What would a market price for Eddie Nketiah look like?
The continuing series looking at comparable players value to estimate what Arsenal players should be worth
Eddie Nketiah’s name has been tossed around in rumors quite a bit this summer. He started the year as Arsenal’s clear number 2 choice at striker (much to my dismay) but ended the year supplanted by Kai Havertz and to a lesser extent Leandro Trossard.
That will make a player uncertain about their future with the club and with him being a home-grown academy product an enticing player to potentially to generate accounting profits.
This is turning into a fun series. If you are just joining I have looked at Aaron Ramsdale and Emile Smith Rowe already doing the exercise and I think today’s will continue that trend.
Nketiah has always divided opinion but it probably comes down to your expectations for him for how you think his stint in the first team has gone with Arsenal. I have always been on the more skeptical side on Nketiah, he was never regarded as a massive prospect but rather a player that seems to have grinded and out worked a lot of players to get where he is.
Over the last three seasons he has played nearly a full season’s worth of minutes and he hasn’t looked like a player that doesn’t belong in the Premier League. He has looked good at times with Arsenal but has also shown weakness that points to me that his fit at a team challenging for the title isn’t perfect.
When the question originally was does this player even belong in the Premier League, it is okay that the answer to the latter question is no. There is no other way to say it but he has been a massive success for the Academy but his useful time as an Arsenal player is coming to an end and a move to another club makes a lot of sense.
His list of similar players is populated with many players that are very solid pros and look like they would fit in with many or do already play for Premier League teams.
As you move further down the list there are even some really surprising names like Victor Osimhen and Darwin Nunez. I can see why they might profile as similar even if I think the gulf in skill is pretty large.
Taking this list of players and the information on transfermarkt for their estimated value and the last time they moved for a transfer fee gives us the following spread of values.
The estimated values are concentrated in the 10-38 million Euro range and the sales in the 5-30 million Euro range. The average estimated value is 26 million with the average sale at 22 million.
Both of these I think match my current expectations which has started creeping up over the last year. I thought for a good while that Nketiah was a negative asset after he signed his big deal as a free agent for Arsenal, with his contract being out of proportion to his production. I thought that he could be moved but unless he was willing to take less money, a team would be reluctant to pay a fee as well.
My read on the situation has changed. Wages have continued to increase with more midtable teams spending. There are now 12 Premier League teams that have two or more players on £100,000 a week or more according to the data on Capology. This figure would have seemed prohibitive a couple seasons ago for many teams outside the top 6 but has moved into the realm of possibility and normality for the wage structure of more and more teams.
It still can be a major factor for how much a team will also pay in transfer fees, especially if a player isn’t certain to be an important first team player but I think that Nketiah now having three seasons of extended play for Arsenal showing production that would be ideal for a midtable team makes that less of a concern.
I think a team in the midtable range committing £7-12 million in wages plus amortized fee is not a stretch, with a salary at roughly £5-6 million a year that leaves £2-7 million a year for the fee which translates to a £10-35 million over 5 years. This is well within the range of the comparable players where they have had teams pay £12-40 million in a transfer fee.
With Nketiah’s current salary on the higher side and the player probably still looking to match it or get a bump the biggest upside might be capped but with multiple teams interested a £20-30 million fee doesn’t seem out of line.
I would like to see Arsenal get at least £10 million in a sale and right now I feel pretty confident that it could be higher than that. It could be the optimism of the transfer season just starting but I think that £20 million is my expectation right now and last year Scott is probably shocked that I am writing this.