Even by the standards of soccer’s murky multibillion-dollar player trading market, where values are at times little more than crowdsourced guesses, one deal in the summer of 2020 stood out.
It was not necessarily the tens of millions of dollars that the Italian league giant Napoli was paying the French club Lille to sign Victor Osimhen that attracted attention. Few would have argued that Osimhen, a young Nigerian striker with a vast upside, was not worth a premium price.
Instead, what raised eyebrows was the valuation placed on four little known players who would be making the opposite journey to northern France: an aging second-string goalkeeper from Greece and three young players of little pedigree.