Dominik Szoboszlai is one the most exciting talents Hungarian football has seen in a long time. At just age 22, he is already captaining the National Team. He made 30 appearances for Hungary so far, scoring eight goals.
Clearly, his exceptional skills are noticed and appreciated internationally as well. He has in fact been listed among the 80 most valued football players globally, ranked by the Switzerland-based International Centre for Sports Studies’ (CIES) Football Observatory.
The prestigious sports science institution estimated the 22-year-old Hungarian attacking midfielder’s market value to be €73.8 million.
That put him at the #50 spot on the list, which considered all professional footballers in the world. CIES significantly overvalued him compared to the popular German football database website Transfermarkt.com, which priced Szoboszlai’s worth at ‘just’ €40 million.
Szoboszlai is currently playing for the German Bundesliga team RB Leipzig, with whom he is under contract until June 2026. He just won his second German Cup with the team, triumphing in the competition in back-to-back years in 2022 and 2023. Szoboszlai even scored a goal in the final against Eintracht Frankfurt, setting the final 2–0 score in the 85th minute.
Rumours of an impending deal with the English Premier League side Newcastle United have been floating in the German and Hungarian sports media for weeks now. While visiting an event by the Hungarian Sports Journalist Association as a special guest, the chief editor of the premiere German sports paper Kicker, Jörg Jakob, also said that Szoboszlai will be leaving Leipzig soon, and transferring to a team in the Premier League.
Newcastle United was bought by a consortium of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), PCP Capital Partners, in 2021, making them one of the richest football clubs in the world overnight. In their first full season under the new leadership, they managed to secure themselves a spot in next year’s UEFA Champions League by finishing fourth in the league. According to information shared in the press, they would be willing to pay a transfer fee for Szoboszlai that is a lot closer to CIES’s €73.8 million price tag than Transfermarkt’s €40 million.
Evidently, the Leipzig midfielder would break the record for the highest transfer fee ever paid for a Hungarian player
many times over—that record, by the way, is already held by him, as RB Leipzig paid €22 million to Red Bull Salzburg in January 2021 to sign him.
Szoboszlai’s Former Teammate Erling Haaland Ranked Most-Valued Player In the World
On the CIES list of most valued players, unsurprisingly, Erling Haaland was ranked #1. The Norwegian striker broke the all-time Premier League top scoring record in his first season with 36 goals. He is also on his way to repeat Manchester United’s historic 1999 treble with his team, Manchester City. City have already won the Premier League and the FA Cup, and are facing the Italian team Internazionale from Milan in the Champions League final tonight in Istambul, Turkey. CIES put Haaland’s market value at a staggering €245.1 million. That is higher than the highest transfer fee ever actually paid, which is held by Neymar, for whom Paris Siant-German “ponied up” €222 million to Barcelona in 2017. Interestingly, Haaland was Szoboszlai’s teammate at the Austrian club Red Bull Salzburg for a brief time, before singing with Borussia Dortmund in Germany.
Second on the list is the Brazilian striker from Real Madrid, Vinícius Júnior, with €196.3 million, followed by Arsenal’s English winger Bukayo Saka, valued at €195.8 million. Interestingly, Real Madrid just announced to have reached a deal with Borussia Dortmund for Jude Bellingham, a player ranked in fourth place in the world’s most valued players list. However, that deal is for a lot less than the English midfielder’s market value purported by CIES: reportedly, Real Madrid is paying €103 million for him, while the sports science research firm priced him at €190.2 million.
Related articles:
