Southampton: Saints current squad valued at £244m by football report

Southampton’s current squad of players has been valued at £244m (€261m) by a recent report valuing the squads of all the teams in Europe’s top fix leagues.

The estimate is provided by the CIES Football Observatory and uses specific algorithms to rank teams from England, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

This sees Saints come in with the 14th most valuable group of players in England and the 44th in the top five leagues.

In all, this seems fairly accurate considering that the transfer value of some players will have decreased in recent years.

Others seem to have benefited from the way that the modern market works and inflates costs.

For example, English duo James Ward-Prowse and Nathan Redmond have a value of around £30-40m given that being a talented homegrown player usually sees a fee increased dramatically.

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Che Adams also has this value according to the CIES algorithms and, whilst this may seem slightly off considering he is yet to score a competitive goal for Saints, he would still demand a high fee given that he was still wanted by a number of teams in January.

Arguably the best assets that Saints have at the moment are midfielder and captain Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, and defender Jan Bednarek.

Both are young in terms of a footballing career – 24 and 23 respectively – and hold important roles in the Saints team under Ralph Hasenhuttl.

Hojbjerg is vital for winning back possession and providing the energy in the middle of the pitch, whilst Bednarek’s knack of being in the right place to make blocks and tackles sees him improving all the time.

CIES values both players between £20-30m, but that figure will surely be higher is Saints choose to cash in on either of them in the near future.

Hasenhuttl will want both men to become parts of his team for the long-term, but recent financial figures released by the club suggest that one or two sales may be on the horizon.

During the 2018/19 campaign, Saints made a £34m loss despite being one of the teams claiming part of an ever-growing pool of television money from the likes of Sky, BT and Amazon.