Alan Shearer is one of the greatest English strikers of all-time, some would even say the greatest.
He is not only Newcastle United’s record goal scorer, but he holds the record for most ever Premier League goals, player to reach 100 PL goals in fewest matches, joint highest number of goals scored in a Premier League season (both 38 and 42 match seasons) and has scored the most PL hat-tricks.
In 1996, when signing for Newcastle from Blackburn Rovers, his transfer fee of £15 million was a world record.
That £15m paid for Shearer in 1996 is the equivalent to around £26m today based on normal inflation rates. However, with the extremely high TV payments and prize money on offer in football today, transfer fees have grown exponentially and have far exceeded traditional rates of inflation.
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So, let’s look at Shearer’s career and compare him to modern day players to work out how much he would be worth in today’s transfer market.
Shearer Before Newcastle
The highest transfer fee ever paid for Shearer was the £15m Newcastle spent to bring him “home” from Blackburn in 1996. It’s estimated that this £15m transfer would worth around £200m in today’s market.
The estimated value of three iconic former Newcastle United strikers in today’s market – including Alan Shearer
To see why, we must look at what Newcastle were actually buying.
Shearer started his professional career at Southampton, having been spotted by their scouts as a schoolboy, and scored a hat-trick on his full debut for the first-team against Arsenal as a seventeen-year-old.
He was given time to grow as a player at Southampton and slowly improved his goal tally. In his final season with them, he netted thirteen goals in the league and twenty-one in all competitions. It would be the first season he scored over twenty goals, something he would go on to do in eight of the nine seasons that followed.
In 1992, just before the start of the first ever Premier League season, Blackburn paid an English transfer record of £3.6m to sign him and he more than returned that fee with the goals he scored.
During the four seasons he spent at Blackburn, Shearer netted 130 goals in all competitions. 112 of those came in the Premier League, including thirty-four in their title winning season of 1994/95. He scored over thirty goals a season for three of the four seasons he was a Blackburn player.
In 1996, Shearer scored five goals to top the goal scorer list at EURO ’96 as he helped England reach the semi finals before an agonising penalty shoot-out defeat to Germany.
So, before joining Newcastle, Shearer had scored a total of 173 competitive goals in all competitions at club level and was already into double figures with the national team.
Transfer Market Today
Now we have had a look at Shearer’s statistics leading up to his record breaking transfer, let’s look at the market today.
The most expensive transfer of all-time is Neymar Jr, who moved from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain for £198m last summer. There are reports of Real Madrid being close to securing a deal to take Neymar back to Spain, but they would need to shatter the current transfer record by meeting his release clause of £350m.
Harry Kane, who is the player most people would look at as a modern-day Shearer, has an estimated market value of around £172.65m but Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy said towards the end of last year that they wouldn’t even entertain an offer of below £200m for their star striker.
Shearer Worth £200m?
With reports of £350m record breaking deals and England’s top striker being worth over £200m, it’s pretty clear that Shearer would have to be worth at least £200m in this current market today.
He was a born goal-scorer, with fantastic strength and leadership qualities that meant players looked up to him. Not only did he score goals, but he also provided them. He was great in the air and was a brilliant penalty-taker.
Aside from his on-pitch qualities, he also provided a marketing boost due to his popularity. More shirts with his name on them were sold and it’s arguable that more tickets were bought by fans who came to see their hero.
Also, at the time of Shearer joining Newcastle, Alex Ferguson had made him his number one transfer target for champions Manchester United. If that happened today, there would probably have been a huge bidding war for his signature which would have driven his price even higher.
Taking all those things into account, £200m may be a low estimate for what Shearer would be worth in the transfer market today.
