Yahoo News Birmingham City squad value handed £5m boost after Knighthead transfer spend
Birmingham City's squad is near unrecognisable. On Saturday at Rotherham, and granted captain Krystian Bielik was only missing through suspension, only three players in the entire 18-man squad were at the club last year - they being Keshi Anderson, Paik Seung-ho and Jay Stansfield, the latter who only arrived in the nick of time on transfer deadline day.
Still gelling, Blues are picking up wins. They're one of the few teams in the entire EFL who remain unbeaten after six games and yet they're only just clicking into gear. It's an endorsement of the work manager Chris Davies - another new face - has been carrying out on the training ground, but also of the talent within squad assembled by Knighthead and the club's recruitment team.
Blues have bloodied the noses of would be promotion rivals Wrexham and Rotherham in the space of a week and welcome Peterborough United in front of another sell-out St Andrew's on Saturday (3pm) hunting for a sixth straight league win for the first time since 1985. That year they were promoted to the old First Division under Ron Saunders.
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Much of the early pace-setting has been aided by recruitment. Indeed it's been some job carried out by the decision makers and investors to largely tear up the script and begin most afresh - and the recruitment is reflected in the numbers and the overall value of the squad. The gurus at Football Transfers, who have drawn up a model using a host of metrics to determine the value of a player, consider Blues to be, ahem, on the rise.
They have drawn up the Player Valuation Model, which estimates the value of almost a quarter of a million footballers around the world, values they update each month based on performance and a host of other attributes - including experience, contract status, the strength of the league, the position they operate in. This is married with a machine learning model which has processed as many as 600,000 previous transfers and seeks patterns.
In short, Blues' squad is considered to be worth just shy of £60m, and that's a near £5m increase on the squad which was relegated last season. They're 61st on the list of 'fastest rising squad values', behind the bright lights of many Premier League clubs - for context, Ipswich Town are 3rd on the list, behind Brighton and Juventus, with their value having skyrocketed after promotion and the transfer window up to north of £180m.
Speaking of values, Blues, according to Football Transfers, have the 146th most valuable squad of all the clubs and players that they have assessed. Again, for context, that figure of £60m is a higher value than 15 Championship clubs, including West Brom, Norwich, Watford, Stoke City and QPR.
As regards to individual prices, this is where some might prove contestable! Certainly Blues won be considering offers in the region of €800k for Paik anytime soon. Stansfield, the club's record transfer, is understandably of the highest value at almost €11m. Christoph Klarer, Dion Sanderson, Lee Buchanan and Bielik are all worth at least almost €4m, as is loanee Luke Harris. Willum Willumsson is second behind Stansfield at €5.2m.
You can view Blues' squad value and look at how they value players, as well as the squad value tables, by clicking here
