if he leaves this winter, how to estimate the price of Kylian Mbappé?

The bomb fell on Wednesday, October 11. According to information from the Spanish newspaper Marca, confirmed by Radio France, Kylian Mbappé wants to leave Paris Saint-Germain this winter. While we thought the saga was finally over with the signing of his new contract on May 21, the French international revived the question which had plagued the capital club’s last season.

This time, there is no question of a departure without compensation for the prodigy of Bondy. You will have to pay a high price to afford the services of the one who landed in Paris in August 2017, with a purchase option of 180 million euros exercised at the end of his first season. Five years have passed since then, the time to be crowned world champion and to become the head of the gondola of the most ambitious club on the European scene. But in the event of departure, how much would Kylian Mbappé be worth?

During a transfer, the value of a player, ultimately, will be the one agreed at the negotiating table. It is malleable, and therefore hard to estimate. With a wet finger, the French agent Yvan Le Mée, who has more than 20 years of experience in the transfer market, is risking the game of predictions. “When we look at the transfer window this summer, Antony, who is far from Mbappé, left Ajax for 100 million for Manchester United. Wesley Fofana cost Chelsea 80 million. Having left Brighton for Chelsea, Marc Cucurella signed for 70. Today, with market prices and the fact that he is a unique player, the market value of Kylian Mbappé is 170 or 180 million euros“, measures the one who negotiated the transfer of Ferland Mendy from Lyon to Real Madrid in 2019.

But where do these amounts originate? They are the fruit of sharp analyses. Two reference sites, Transfermarkt and that of the International Center for Sports Studies (CIES), specialize in estimating the market values ​​of players. Their estimates of the price of the French star, from 160 to 200 million euros, can give good indications. From a sample of 1,790 paid transfers made between July 2012 and January 2020, CIES noticed a correlation of more than 80% between the amounts actually paid and its forecasts.

For this Swiss-based football observatory, which has been calculating the market values ​​of players since 2013, Kylian Mbappé is worth “up to 200 million euros”. It is based on a statistical model taking into account a large number of variables. Player performance, reputation of his team, his championship, even his selection, duration of his contract, age, position or even economic variations in the transfer market.

Kylian Mbappé ticks all the boxes to be very expensive: he is young, attacking, international in a selection of reigning world champions, his year 2022 is particularly prolific, his team is the best in a Top 5 championship and one of the most prominent on the European scene, all in a transfer market that broke all records this summer, with 2.2 billion euros spent. The only downside is the length of his contract with Paris. CIES assume he is tied to the capital club until June 2024, leaving him with just 18 months.

“The logic of our modeling is to propose a base which is then an element of the negotiation, which will depend on many other factors. I like to talk about argus”explains Loïc Ravenel, scientific collaborator at the football observatory, sometimes called upon to work with European clubs or to intervene in disputes relating to transfer amounts. “Everything is not simply the result of intellectual reflection, but of a permanent back and forth with the actors of the game and the way in which they themselves consider the values“.

As for Transfermarkt, a German site created in 2000 and which became a benchmark in the 2010s, the method for calculating market values ​​is based on the crowdsourcing. It relies on the opinions of a large community of volunteers and decides through its specialized offices. Several updates are made during the year. The last for the French championship, in May, valued Kylian Mbappé at 160 million euros, but the amount could change at the beginning of November, on the occasion of the next one.

“In the case of our top values, most valued players, we have to cooperate with Transfermarkt representatives in other countries to see what the trends are on their own star players. If the value of Mbappé were to rise in November, we should ask ourselves what will happen to that of Erling Haaland. We must reflect on the hierarchy that we propose. France must not decide, for its part, to put Mbappé at 250 without seeing that Haaland or Vinicius would do“, explains Ronan Caroff, area manager from the France zone, who imagines, on a personal basis, a transfer of around 200 million euros if the PSG striker is actually forced to leave the capital in the coming months.

Whether it is the Transfermarkt model or the CIES model, neither can predict the amount of a transfer with certainty. The CIES, which is based on precise value criteria, and Transfermarkt, which above all wants to reflect the intrinsic value of a player, remain only a base subject to the law of the market and the madness of compulsive buying of clubs for a player of such caliber.

“If ever a club decides to put 300 or 350 million on the table this winter to recruit Kylian Mbappé, we cannot have predicted it. And oAbove all, don’t try to anticipate by putting amounts never touched before”, adds Ronan Caroff, who remembers an adaptation of market prices after Neymar’s record transfer to Paris in 2017, for 222 million euros. An amount that CIES had predicted to within two million at the time, which does not mean that he is sure of the 200 million euros he is advancing, quite the contrary. “On these super talents, we have a fairly large margin of uncertainty because of their uniqueness. Kylian Mbappé is not an average player”warns Loïc Ravenel.

In these spheres of price, in any case, the suitors will not be legion. For French agent Yvan Le Mée, only three or four clubs in Europe can afford the 23-year-old forward, but that doesn’t mean they need him: “Real will not move after the epilogue of last summer. The only two clubs I see are Liverpool, but who have already bought Darwin Nunez for 100 million euros, and Chelsea, with their new owner who wants to make significant investments.. All these questions are still a bit premature according to the agent, because the 23-year-old striker “has no hand“. The period “post-World Cup, is not at all the right time to let go of players“and because Paris runs”already the risk of losing Lionel Messi at the end of the season“.