Stats reveal Man City buying Erling Haaland is the biggest bargain in football history

Erling Braut Haaland will almost certainly be a Manchester City player next season.

The Premier League champions announced on Tuesday afternoon that they had agreed terms to sign the Borussia Dortmund striker with the deal only subject to finalising a package with the player himself.

It’s a massive coup for City with Haaland ranking amongst the best strikers in the world at just 21 years old, boasting an outrageous record of 85 goals in 88 appearances for Dortmund.

In fact, considering that Haaland is touted as a future Ballon d’Or winner, the Citizens can rub their hands together safe in the knowledge that they’ve snapped him up for what is ultimately a cut price.

Yes, City will have to pay agents fees, monstrous wages and no doubt plenty of other extra costs, but the fact that they could snap him up for a transfer fee of just £54 million is an absolute steal.

To put the price tag into context, the data gurus at Transfermarkt actually laud him as the second-most valuable player in men’s football with an eye-watering worth of £135 million.

That means – for those of you doing the mental maths – City have gotten their hands on arguably the world’s best number nine for a staggering £81.00 million less than he’s actually worth.

And there’s good reason to think that it makes him the biggest bargain in football history because we simply can’t find a bigger gap between transfer value and transfer fee on the Transfermarkt database.

That’s because we sorted their list of the ‘most valuable transfers’ by the difference between how much the player was considered to be worth at the time of the deal and what they actually moved for.

In other words, we’re able to collate the most objective list of transfer bargains possible, drawing