The Most Expensive Eleven Players by Football League

Most Expensive League Elevens

The Premier League is often considered the best league in the world and although there may have been some form of contest with its major European counterparts in the past, the claim is now almost undisputed.

Especially when you consider that most of the biggest names in world football are now plying their trade within the confines of the English top tier and because of this, there are millions of pounds worth of talent playing for some of Europe’s biggest outfits.

To the point where millions has now become billions and with the likes of Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United not being afraid to splash the cash, it means a stockpile of expensive players are currently on their books.

Which begs the question, if you were to build a Premier League team on market value alone what would it look like? Not only that, but how much would that starting eleven be worth? £800m? £900m?

No, even more. If you took the 11 players in the Premier League Market Value XI below, they would be worth £1.007bn. Yes that is right, more than a billion pounds – albeit only just on just 11 individual players.

An eleven that is made up of no less than six Manchester City players and alongside them are four players from Arsenal and one sole representative from Liverpool. The most expensive being Erling Haaland at €180m, the least expensive being former City teammate Oleksandr Zinchenko.

The Ukrainian left back now represents Arsenal and is worth just €42m by comparison. It may not sound a lot compared to the goal machine that is Haaland, but Zinchenko’s value alone is just under half of the Scottish Premiership’s comparative eleven (€89m).

While the thing that needs to considered is that just two of these eleven are considered as home grown talents. Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold and Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka have worked their way through their respective academies and if they were to be sold, would generate substantial profits.

Then again, with two players of this calibre, it is highly unlikely that either Liverpool or Arsenal are going to part with the talent in question and if anything, their market value is only going to increase further over the next few years.

As we can see, five of the eleven superstars are worth €100m or more, the attacking trio of Haaland, Saka and Manchester City’s Phil Foden is worth €410m as a fearsome threesome and these three players would be worth their weight in goals.

Then again, a single market value team only stands in isolation for people to be in awe of, now this Premier League Market Value XI needs some European competition – competition that look as follows: 

Bundesliga

Total Worth: €760m

Serie A

Total Worth: €625m

Ligue 1

Total Worth: €745m

La Liga

Total Worth: €915m

Comparison

Here we have four European rival outfits looking to test the Premier League when it comes to the team with the most expensive overall value and although this quartet does come close, it does not come close enough.

While a look at these other four Market Value XI teams throws up some rather interesting insight. For example, when looking at Ligue 1, the team is comprised of 10 PSG players and one from Monaco.

For all intents and purposes, the Ligue 1 Market Value XI is almost the de facto PSG team. The only outlier in all of this is Alexsandr Golovin for Monaco and had PSG’S Kim Min Jae be worth just €6m more, this team would have been for Paris-based players.

At a total of €745m, Ligue 1 sits €15m behind Germany’s Bundesliga and like their French counterparts, the German representative team is almost a full one-team affair – for PSG, read Bayern Munich instead.

The Allianz Arena outfit now have the goal machine which is otherwise known as Harry Kane within their ranks and the former Tottenham forward slots nicely into the cream of the Bundesliga’s most expensive crop.

Not only that, but he does so with eight of his teammates and it is only Borussia Dortmund’s Gregor Kobel in goal and Bayer Leverkusen defender Jeremie Frimpong which have managed to break the Munich monopoly.

The Bundesliga Market Value XI is worth €760m, Bayern Munich have as much as €680m worth of players in their team. Compare this to €715m for PSG and you can understand why any fixture between these two is always keenly anticipated.

Both those €680m and €715m figures are worth more than the whole Serie A Market Value XI and whereas this league used to be the home of the very best players in the world a generation or so ago, England is now the most glamourous outpost when it comes to transferred talent.

This means the Serie A Market Value XI is worth just $625m and interestingly enough, the Italian team is comprised from players of five different teams – the widest spread across each of these top five European leagues.

The same cannot be said for La Liga and this is the team that runs the Premier League the closest and it does so with talent that plays for either Barcelona or Real Madrid. This team should be renamed the El Clasico Market Value XI.

A team that consists of the world-class talents of Jude Bellingham and after the England midfielder swapped the black and yellow of Borussia Dortmund to the famous white of Real Madrid, the transition has been nothing short of seamless.

So seamless has the move been, you would think Bellingham has been at the club for a decade or more. Regardless of the time has been there, the former Birmingham City starlet is now worth €150m.

A value that means Bellingham alone is worth nearly one-sixth of the La Liga Market Value XI’s overall value, a percentage that suggests that he and teammate Vinicius Junior who is worth the same are doing a lot of La Liga’s heavy lifting.

Like the Premier League though, La Liga also has five players that are worth €100m or more and were it not for the fact Robert Lewandowski is approaching the back end of his career at the age of 35-years-old, there is every chance that the Polish forward would be worth more than €30m.

To provide greater context, we will now place the five Market Value XI’s in a league table ranked by overall value and we will also list some other entrants in our competition:

The top five have already been covered but now it is time to focus on the gold rush which is the Saudi Pro League and although it is doing its best to mop up the best in the game, there is still a lot of catching up to do.

If we look at the Saudi Pro League Market Value XI, it looks as follows:

For all the outlay over the course of the summer, not one of the players in the market values team are worth more than €60m and even the most valuable player Neymar is only worth €50m – a player who is set to be out injured for the next nine months.

Then again, we cannot forget that the Saudi Pro League is only in phase one of its development and although it has managed to snare the likes of Sadio Mane, Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema, their overall market worth has diminished since their moves to the Middle East.

At €281.8m in total, the Saudi Pro League Market Value XI’s overall value is 72% less than that of their Premier League counterparts and if you compared the Scottish Premiership to the Premier League, that percentage rockets up to 91.1%

Other Divisions

The Scottish Premiership Market Value XI unsurprisingly consists of players that wear either the colours of Rangers or Celtic and these 11 players have an overall worth of €89m, a figure that does not even come close to the EFL Championship.

Because the EFL Championship Market Value XI has managed to create a team that is worth €201m and it looks like this:

10 of the players have come from teams that were relegated from the Premier League last season and this is a key factor in the team still managing to consist of a rather sizeable value when compared to their rivals north of the border.

The only player who is not playing for a team that dropped out of the top tier at the end of the 2022/23 season is Illias Chair of QPR. The attacking midfielder may be a surprise entry in the Championship eleven but he could soon be playing in League One if the R’s fortune’s do not improve.

The Championship Market Value XI is worth 80% less than that of the Premier League but in turn is worth 85% more than that of League One below and this only highlights the gulf in value the further down the pyramid you go.

The League One Market Value XI is worth just €28.7m by comparison and its most valuable player is Tom Holmes of Reading. The 23-year-old Centre back is worth €5m on his own and this is almost the same as the overall value of League Two below.

The fourth tier of English football has comprised a Market Value XI which is worth €8.55m and when compared to the Premier League three levels below, there is a deficit of 99.1% - even when compared to the Championship, the percentage only increases to 95.7%.

Something that only further highlights how the money at the top does not filter down to the bottom and with the Premier League clubs still in discussions regarding how to redistribute funds as part of their ‘new deal’ agreement, a conclusion to these protracted talks cannot come soon enough.

Author Information

Dan Tracey has carved a remarkable path as a versatile writer, data analyst, and podcaster throughout his six-year journey in the sports data industry. His impressive portfolio includes contributions to UEFA's annual technical reports and crafting informed content for sports betting sites like TheLinesUS and Goal. With a talent for voice broadcasting, Dan offers thought-provoking commentary on podcasts and shares weekly betting insights. Currently collaborating with OLBG.com, Dan's presence is a testament to his skill in turning complex data into compelling narratives. Wherever there's data to decipher, Dan's analytical acumen is often at play. The article was edited and Published by Steve Madgwick

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Data correct as of 20th November.