Ajax: De Jong cost €1 and the entire Juve-beating XI €50m
The starting XI that knocked Juventus out of the Champions League on Tuesday cost a little over €50m to assemble with Blind accounting for €16m.
In the modern transfer market it has become commonplace for talk of a player moving clubs to be followed by an eight or nine figure fee, but Ajax have gone about constructing the side that has eliminated holders Real Madrid and Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus in consecutive rounds in a completely different manner.
The starting XI in Turin on Tuesday evening cost Ajax less than half of what Juve paid for Ronaldo last summer and one of the stars of the youthful Dutch side, Frenkie de Jong, was bought for the princely sum of a single euro. That deal will make Willem II a healthy profit this summer with the Eredivisie side retaining a 10-percent slice of the reported 75 million euros Barça have paid for the 21-year-old.
Four other starters in Turin are academy products (Joël Veltman, Matthijs de Ligt, Noussair Mazraoui and Donny van den Beek) and Lasse Scöne was a free transfer from NEC, meaning half of the Ajax outfield players in Turin did not cost the club a cent.
Ajax XI against Juventus now worth €330m
The most expensive player in Erik ten Hag’s side is Daley Blind, who came through the Ajax academy but was bought back from Manchester United for 16 million euros. The acquisitions of Hakim Ziyech, Dusan Tadic and David Neres were all for 12 million euros or less. Goalkeeper André Onana, who has been the subject of interest from Barcelona and could command a fee of around 30 million euros if Ajax were to sell, cost 150,000 euros when he joined from the Camp Nou academy in 2015.
Now, the market value of the starting XI against Juventus is estimated at around 330 million euros, with De Jong (75 million) and De Ligt (70 million) leading the way.