EUROCASH #6 - Belgium's class of 2016 alumni still twice as valuable as rivals
The Golden Generation didn't win anything - but our model values reinforcements such as Jérémy Doku. Which of Romania, Ukraine and Slovakia can keep pace in Group E?
Belgium are ranked third in the world, they qualified unbeaten for Euro 2024 with 20 points from eight games, and haven’t lost since Domenico Tedesco was appointed as head coach in February last year.
Their matches since then have comprised 10 wins - including away victories against Sweden, Germany and Austria - and four draws, including 2-2 against England at Wembley in March, when Jude Bellingham’s equaliser in the fifth minute of added time in the second half saved the hosts’ blushes.
And yet Belgium are only eighth favourites to win the upcoming Euros, or joint seventh favourites with the Netherlands in some lists. In any case, they trail England, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Italy in the markets.
Why might this be the case? Think of the talent and experience as you rattle off the names Kevin de Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Yannick Carrasco, Jan Vertongen, Axel Witsel and Thomas Meunier. They’re all in Belgium’s Euro 2024 squad. And were all in Belgium’s Euro 2016 squad.
Back then they were part of a talent pool expected to achieve great things. That same squad included Liverpool’s Divock Origi, 21, Marseille’s Michy Batshuayi, 22, Chelsea’s Thibaut Courtois, 24, Chelsea’s Eden Hazard, 25, Liverpool’s Christian Benteke, 25, Tottenham’s Toby Alderweireld, 27, and Mousa Dembélé, 28, and Manchester United’s Marouane Fellaini, 28.
Now they’re all the wrong side of 30, quite a long way in the cases of Vertongen and Witsel, and though the 2014-2015-2016 ‘golden generation’ of Belgian players reached No.1 in the world rankings in late 2015, and peaked at the 2018 Word Cup, where they were narrowly beaten in the semi-finals by eventual winners France, they didn’t fully realise their potential.
Before considering whether the current Belgium team is underrated, a quirky stat about Belgian players in 2014-15. As a cohort, they were the best paid nationality across Europe’s ‘Big 5’ leagues. There were 34 Belgian players in first-team squads in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 combined - and they earned an average of £2.17m a year each.
Everyone wanted a blossoming Belgian, and major clubs across the continent would pay big bucks for one.
This put them ahead of, among others, English players (£2.1m average per year at the time), Dutch players (just under £2.1m), Brazilian players (£1.77m). German players (£1.34m), Spanish players (£1.17m), French players (£1m) and Italian players (£957,000). This research was published in May 2015 in that year’s Global Sports Salaries Survey, free as a PDF here, where the key data is on pages 22-23.
Back to Belgium in summer 2024, and a squad containing Leandro Trossard, a recent title-chaser with Arsenal, Youri Tielemans, now Champions League bound with Aston Villa, and Jérémy Doku, who played in 29 Premier League games in Manchester City’s four-in-a-row season just finished.
They are grouped this summer with Ukraine, Slovakia and Romania.
As I have been doing with every group at Euro 2024, today I’ll break down what the betting markets, the FIFA world rankings and Sporting Intelligence’s resident pundit for this preview series, Thomas Hitzlsperger, thinks will happen in Group E. Then we’ll turn to the model I developed, based on the insurable value of the members of each squad.
I’m going to detail:
the comparable value of each squad within that model
the value of their best starting XI
the identity and value of their most valuable player
how the top 20 players in this model are distributed between the teams in the group
and finally the predicted final standings for Group E.