Manchester United have paid Italian club Atalanta £64million ($81.28m; €74.28m) to sign the Danish striker Rasmus Hojlund.
Hojlund is 20 years old. He has only one season of experience in a top-five European league having joined Atalanta from Austrian side Sturm Graz last summer. At Atalanta, Hojlund started 20 league fixtures, scoring nine times. He completed 90 minutes in the Italian Serie A on only five occasions. For the Danish national team, Hojlund has played a full game only twice, against Finland and Kazakhstan (he scored five goals in those two games).
Atalanta were not in European competitions last season, so Hojlund’s playing time in the Champions League extends to just two starts for Sturm Graz against Dynamo Kyiv in the third-round qualifying stage of the tournament last August.
And that, in terms of the basic facts of his exposure to top-level football, is about as much as many people know.
None of this is to say that Hojlund represents either smart or unwise business for Manchester United. Every significant investment, regardless of the industry, can be laced with risk and reward, but it does pose intriguing questions as to how big-money judgments are made on young talents when the data set available to a recruitment team appears to offer such a narrow frame of reference.
The Athletic has spoken to several individuals who work at the elite level of European football in the fields of performance, recruitment and analysis, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorised to speak publicly. The industry consensus veers between cautious optimism, some scepticism and plenty of people who simply say they have not seen enough evidence to form a firm opinion either way.
Hojlund’s sample size, in terms of its relevance to Manchester United, does appear uniquely small, particularly when you factor in the quality of his minutes, which is a metric often used by clubs. This essentially means they weigh statistical evidence according to leagues considered to be at a higher level. As such, Hojlund’s data playing in Serie A will be weighed more heavily than his performances in the Austrian Bundesliga, where he played 18 times for Sturm Graz.
As a comparison, Manchester City signed Erling Haaland, then aged 21, from Borussia Dortmund in the summer of 2022 and, factoring in wages and agent fees, the Norwegian will cost City considerably more than United will spend on Hojlund. Yet in terms of a dataset to assess the player, the body of evidence was overwhelming. He had played 89 matches for the German club across two and a half years, scoring 86 goals, and he had regularly competed in the Champions League for three years going back to 2019, when he scored a hat-trick for Red Bull Salzburg against Genk in his first game in the competition. In 2020-21, he scored 41 goals in the same number of appearances.
Erling Haaland at Red Bull Salzburg (Photo: Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images)
Another comparison may be Darwin Nunez, who signed for Liverpool for an initial £64m last summer from Benfica having spent two seasons with the Portuguese side. The Uruguayan, aged 22, had reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League with Benfica and started matches against Barcelona, Ajax and Liverpool, scoring six times in 10 matches in the tournament. He was also the top scorer in the Portuguese league, with 26 goals coming in the 24 matches he started.
Yet as Nunez has demonstrated, a greater body of evidence does not guarantee instant success. His debut season in England saw a modest 15-goal return and a mixture of promising and erratic displays. Even the most optimistic Manchester United fans will likely be braced for inconsistency from Hojlund in his first campaign, particularly as he is recovering from an injury and is unlikely to hit full speed for several weeks.
At Atalanta, a bedding-in period was needed. He started only four games during his first three months at the club as he adapted to the physical upgrade required between Austrian and Italian football. We do not yet know how he will cope with the increase in intensity between Serie A and the Premier League, but he has twice moved abroad (from Denmark to Austria to Italy) and found a way to adapt, a trait United find promising.
GO DEEPER
Manchester United’s ‘Hellhound’ Rasmus Hojlund: From €2m sub to £73m striker in 18 months
While the Hojlund deal offers many unknowns, it does underline the scarcity value of elite or high-potential strikers in the current market. This summer, United manager Erik ten Hag wanted a centre-forward to bolster his team’s ambitions, but his club were left with the firm impression that any deal for Harry Kane, Tottenham’s 30-year-old striker at the other end of the experience scale, would require a fee in excess of £100million, as well as a wage package up to £30m per year. The asking price for Napoli’s Victor Osimhen also sailed beyond £130m.
Although United have committed £64m for Hojlund, his salary is considerably lower than Kane or Osimhen. After a decade in which United have experienced a variation of outcomes with vast wage expenditure on ageing forwards such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Radamel Falcao, Alexis Sanchez, Edinson Cavani, Odion Ighalo and Robin van Persie, the club have opted to go in a different direction by recruiting — at high cost — a young player they hope will lead the line for many years to come (he has signed a five-year contract with the option of another 12 months).
When it comes to valuing a young player, several factors come into play. There has been no shortage of people pointing out that Atalanta bought Hojlund for €17m only a year ago and now they have more than quadrupled their return. Within this, a variety of explanations come into play. The first is the identity of the bidding club — Manchester United. That means the price always rises. At Manchester City this week, coach Pep Guardiola said that for his team, “to buy a player is £10m-15m more expensive than other clubs, all the time it is like that”.
It is a familiar story to any executives who have negotiated transfers at clubs such as United, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid or any other club known to have a large budget and high revenue streams. One former employee in United’s recruitment department remembers an occasion where an asking price “quite literally doubled” when United phoned up to register their interest, although the employee also recognises that the club did not always help their cause because, in the cases of players such as Harry Maguire, Fred or Alexis Sanchez, United demonstrated a willingness to keep bidding for a player that a rival wealthy club such as Manchester City walked away from. That indicated to the market that United would eventually fold in a negotiation.
The level of competitive tension also hikes the price and in the case of Hojlund, United were under the impression that PSG (who made at least one firm offer) and Chelsea were also interested. Other factors include the selling club’s awareness of a buying club’s need (in the case of United, the entire world knew they required a striker this summer and that Kane was beyond them), while recent deals in the market are also used as a signpost to steer a price.
Take, for instance, the example of Mykhaylo Mudryk, who signed for Chelsea from Shakhtar Donetsk in an £88.5million transfer in January, just as he turned 22. While negotiating with Arsenal and Chelsea, the Ukrainian club’s sporting director Darijo Srna cited Manchester United’s signings of Antony (£82m) and Jadon Sancho (£73m), as well as Manchester City’s £100m deal for Jack Grealish as comparative price points. Mudryk, incidentally, is a similar case to Hojlund in that he had started only 25 matches for Shakhtar Donetsk before he found himself landing at Chelsea for a figure approaching £90m, which underlines how England’s elite clubs appear to be moving fast and decisively when the first glimpses of talent arrive.
Mykhaylo Mudryk (Photo: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
“Value is so open to interpretation now in the market, with everything going on in Saudi Arabia and the money involved and everything else,” says Yousuf Sajjad, the technical director of Dutch second division side Den Bosch. “You almost start to wonder who really knows the answer. You can only try and add some context. Value itself often comes down to negotiations between people, each of whom have their own opinions.
“We had an example where we were selling probably our best player, our captain. For my valuation, I compared him to all the other players in that position, the transfers that have happened over the past five years and then I looked at those players in more detail to see how they compared to the player we had. That then gives me a rough idea of an asking price being fair or not. I wanted to be equipped in the negotiation to say ‘This is the reason why I am asking for this’.”
When it comes to making a judgment on a young player, clubs will use all manner of methods. The most thorough operators will employ subjective and objective tools. Many clubs in the Champions League now have in-house data analysts and sport scientists who, between them, mould player profiles suited to the needs of the head coach for each position. This will then allow them to filter specific metrics that the head coach considers important, which, in the case of a striker for Ten Hag (beyond the obvious goals and assists), may include factors such as expected goals per 90 minutes, high-intensity sprints, accelerations and pressures.
Sometimes these stats may appear lower than a coach desires when a player is younger, in particular something like aerial win rates which tend to be weaker but can be projected upwards with strength and growth over time. Clubs will sometimes use external data platforms, but the leading clubs now also have their in-house algorithms which allow them to pit prospective targets against pretty much every player in Europe within their defined style of play.
In some cases, the data provided by a platform such as SkillsCorner can provide a strong reference point for how a player might adapt to a different league. This has certainly aided the case of French club AS Monaco, who have sold Aurelien Tchouameni to Real Madrid for £85.3million as well as defensive pair Axel Disasi and Benoit Badiashile to Chelsea for a combined £73m in the past 12 months alone.
Aurelien Tchouameni at Monaco (Photo: Valery Hache/AFP via Getty Images)
In the 2021-22 season, data on SkillsCorner, provided to The Athletic by Monaco last summer, showed that the team were the third-highest in Europe’s top five leagues for total distance covered (every metre a team runs on the pitch at any speed), high-speed running (anything up to 25km per hour) and sprint distance (anything above 25km per hour). By demonstrating their talent in such a physically demanding team, the trio of players provided reassurance to recruitment teams across Europe, who could see from the data that they would likely be able to cope with the intensity of higher-level football.
“But the reality,” one performance analyst explains, “is that there is no algorithm to equate 1,000 minutes of football in Hungary to 1,000 minutes of football in the Premier League. You have to understand you are not comparing apples with apples. And if the sample size is small, then it is about other tricks of the trade. It is about scouts watching him, researching his character, speaking to the player and his agent, but also recognising that there are times you take a punt because the depth chart of information is not quite there.”
The scouting process can be rigorous, even in the case of very young players. Before Manchester United attempted to sign 17-year-old Jude Bellingham in the summer of 2020 (the player instead joined Borussia Dortmund), United had viewed him 47 times from the age of 11 upwards, which left them in no doubt of his potential. In Hojlund’s case, United say they have monitored him since his period at Copenhagen, which included 15 goals in 22 appearances in the under-19 team in the 2020-21 season but then only four senior starts and no full 90 minutes completed. Scouts had more to see when Hojlund joined Sturm Graz, where he started 17 league games.
Sajjad, a former head of emerging talent at Arsenal and lead recruitment analyst at Chelsea, says the major challenge is “to try and paint a picture of a young player because they’re going through so many things at that point in their career and also in their life growth and psychological development”. At Arsenal, he introduced a rating system that differentiated between the performance consistency of a young player, but also their potential based on the knowledge and know-how of the club’s scouts, who understood the type of football they wished to play.
In the case of a striker, he says: “You look at their natural goalscoring abilities, their instincts, what type of opposition they score against and don’t score against. What conditions do they find difficult? Because all of these things will play a part. Then you try to delve a little bit deeper — what’s their family setup? What are they doing on a day-to-day basis? How does that link to where he is at right now and his development stage?”
These are the questions United’s recruitment team will have asked, but even the most thorough operations leave plenty of unknowables.
(Top photo: Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)
