Top 20 revealed 

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Since 2004 Transfermarkt has been using its world famous market values to rank and predict the value of every top player in the world of football. These values are often used to pit clubs and players against one another by fans across the globe, but they also give an excellent insight into which players our dozens of data scouts and staff members rate higher than the rest.

This year’s list of the most valuable U21 players is a who’s who of wonderkids and established world class players, but how often do Transfermarkt market values line up with real-life talent? To find out, today we’ve gone back 10 years to see which 20 players aged 21 or younger were valued higher than all others in the world to find out how good our predictions were back then.

The most valuable U21 players in 2016

As we can see from the table below, many of the most highly-rated U21 talents in 2016 were players that were already household names at the time. At the top of the list is Raheem Sterling, who was already considered one of the best players in the Premier League at the age of 21 with a market value of €50 million. He’s joined by another well-known star in Paris Saint-Germain defender Marquinhos, who had a market value of €30m at the age of 21. The rest of the top five is made up of three more Premier League stars, in Manchester United duo Memphis Depay (€28m) and Anthony Martial (€25m) as well as young Everton defender John Stones (€25m).

How many U21 stars lived up to their potential?

While the concept of judging a player’s career is highly subjective, we can use the market values of the players in question over the last 10 years to see if they continued to increase or perhaps peaked at this moment in time when the buzz around them was at its peak. And when we look at the column of each player’s highest career market value, we can see which players did and didn’t live up the promise they showed in 2016.

As we can see, the vast majority of the 20 players went on to higher levels in their career. The most valuable of which was, unsurprisingly, Sterling whose market value rose to a remarkable €160m. In second place was Bernardo Silva, whose market value may have been €15m at Monaco in 2016, but hit a high of €100m at Man City. In third place are two players who reached €75m in market value: the aforementioned Marquinhos at PSG and former Athletic Bilbao and Man City defender Aymeric Laporte. Fifth place goes to José María Giménez, who hit a high of €70m after being valued at €18m in 2021.

In total, 14 of the top 20 highly rated youngsters from 2016 achieved a market value of €40m or higher over the course of their career, with just a handful struggling to live up to the hype and adding much more value to their name after being tipped as a talent to keep an eye on. This includes FC Basel striker Breel Embolo (€16m in 2016 and career high of just €22m), Fenerbahce attacker Lazar Markovic (€15m in 2016 and career high of just €20m) and midfielder Óliver Torres, who struggled to raise his market value much higher than his 2016 figure of €14m. However, the player that stands out for all the wrong reasons is Abdul Rahman Baba, whose market value of €15m in 2016 was his highest ever career market value, which certainly suggested that the young defender never quite lived up the billing at Chelsea.