Spurs Harry Kane is worth more than Barcelona’s Messi
The CIES Football Observatory has crunched the data and concluded that Spurs striker Harry Kane is worth more in the transfer market than Barcelona’s Lionel Messi. Total balls.
No disrespect to Kane, but how many football fans will boast “I saw Harry Kane”? To see Messi in the flesh is to witness something extraordinary, a player who lifts the spirits. A friend from Napoli interjected a pub debate on which top player we’d all enjoyed watching live. Names poured out: Thierry Henry, Eric Cantona, Johan Cruyff, Franco Baresi, Ziendine Zidane and Franz Beckenbauer. He raised his hands and if spelling out a neon sign above the door to the star attraction, move them from left to right as he declared: “I saw Maradona.”
Messi is better. He is also, as one sports writer notes, the cure: “Some weeks especially we need to plunge head-first into the joys of sport after fretting about the contents of a Jiffy bag or whether England fans will be targeted by thugs in Russia or if a pundit should be sacked for gobbing at a fan…Messi is the best antidote to any creep of dissatisfaction.”
But away from the thrill of live action, in an office block in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, the boffins at CIES have calculated not only Messi’s monetary value but how he ranks against other players in England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France. The challenge is to decide which player represents the best investment for their current club. Kane, who cost Spurs nothing to recruit, is worth £173m (€198.2m); Messi, who joined Barcelona as as child, is worth £172m (€196.8m).
CIES explains its method:
The estimated values are calculated using an exclusive algorithm conceived by the CIES Football Observatory research team. An increasing number of professional clubs and football intermediaries have recourse to the approach developed for transfer negotiations and litigation. The estimations for all big-5 league players are available here.
Here’s the list of talent;
So Kane is worth more than Messi – but only if you reduce football to a sport best watched via screens, accessed through a betting app and broken down to the raw data, reducing every aspect of humanity into quantifiable, anodyne chunks. One day they’ll bring all the greats back to their pomp with a new software package, and show us if Bobby Charlton and Pele were better than Ronaldo and Messi. The fans, meanwhile, should save up for something far more vital: a ticket to see Messi play live.
Posted: 20th, March 2018 | In: News, Sports, Spurs Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
