Skip to content

Mateo Kovačić

Croatia · the desk

Midfield, Croatia

Club football at Manchester City FC.

Sourced facts, dated and on the record. Squad membership, and his club when a source names one. Nothing invented; we don’t make players up.

At a glance

  • age

    31

    sourced with the squad

  • position

    Midfield

    Croatia

  • club

    Manchester City FC

    football-data.org

  • club tier

    1971

    ClubElo strength

  • our board

    #78

    of 1424 rated players

  • folded so far

    1130′

    20 appearances

  • transfer market value (EUR millions), as a rank among peers

    10.00

    94th percentile of peers

On the pitch

Chances created for Croatia, on the record.

  • goals

    0

  • assists

    1

goals and assists from our captured match events · caps and minutes from the appearance record

Sourced

squad
Croatia · Midfieldfootball-data.org · 2026-06-29
club
Manchester City FCfootball-data.org · 2026-06-29

Sourced context, nothing more. It never touches a call.

Our rating · the working

the board

1986 ±45

his quality rating: club, age and measured output. The board orders by this plus his World Cup form, less a discount for how much we can measure him.

How the number is builtopenclose

1955 full roster Elo (31 from national-team results)

the ± is how settled the number is, more minutes, tighter band

Tier 2, lineups + results, how rich the evidence is, not just how much

at or near his peak, no projected upside from age

Where he starts (his team’s strength, we refuse to invent what we haven’t measured) plus two fixed nudges make the quality rating above; the last line is what national-team results have added since, taking it to his full roster Elo.

starts at Croatia's strengththe fair club-over-national anchor, every player's starting point
1976
age curve at 31 (midfields' curve)measured from the open archive by our own study (defenders: the published literature's shape), never fitted to our calls
-26
transfer market value, a sourced market-consensus quality prior (the stronger reading for him here)his percentile among minutes-qualified peers, from club seasons
+36
quality rating · club, age + measured output
1986
form: national-team results, 20 appearances1130 minutes, weighted by margin, surprise and his match stats, but shared across the XI
-31
full roster Elo · with results
1955

Where the +36 skill term comes from

Not a reputation, a measurement. We score every shot in the data ourselves and rank him among minutes-qualified peers; a fixed arithmetic turns that rank into points.

measured
10.00 transfer market value (EUR millions), as a rank among peers
his rank
94th percentile of qualified peers
scored from
the CC0 Transfermarkt community mirror; a market-consensus quality prior, taken at a capped weight where it reads a player higher than our (fixed, partial) shot/event data can
the arithmetic
46 pts/σ × z(94.0th) = 46 × 1.55 × 0.5 (position weight) = +36

A forward-only shadow signal, as of 2026-06-27. The skill term comes from our own xG models over the open archive; the rest is earned, recorded per appearance, auditable, never back-filled. It never moves a live call.

The notebook

The lines a beat writer keeps, except every one of ours is read off the ledger above, auditable to the night. Nothing invented.

  • standing

    #78 of 1424 on our board, top 10% of everyone we rate.

  • vs his seed

    The folded nights have cost him 31 points off his seed, kept on the record, like everything.

What he’d cost · our estimate

€11m€43m €22m

Not a figure from any valuation site; we don’t republish those. Our own model: the level he plays at, what we’ve measured of him, his age and his role. A band, not a point: we can’t see contract length or release clauses, the two biggest real drivers, so we say so.

The workingopenclose
reference feea mid-tier-club, peak-age forward of average measured skill
€8m
club tier 1971the level he plays at, the strongest signal of what a club pays
×6.39
ageage 31, past the fee-peak, value falls ~18% a year
×0.45
midfielder fee factorstrikers set the market's top; midfield runs close; defence and goal at the record books' discounts
×0.90
individual skillmeasured 62th percentile of peers
×1.11
our estimate
€22m

fee-model v3 priors (panel-anchored, 2026-06), calibrated against our reported fees. The band is roughly two-in-three likely; contract length and release clauses are data we don’t hold. Context only, it never touches a call.

The fee record · sourced

The market’s last public word: €29m (2023-06). Our estimate today: ≈ €22m. The gap is evidence, many of them, together, recalibrate our model; no single one rewrites him.

our read: richly priced , we rate him 26% below his last market price (a gem signal, context only)

  • 2023-06-27Chelsea Manchester City€29m
  • 2019-07-01Real Madrid Chelsea€45m
  • 2018-08-09Real Madrid Chelsealoan
  • 2015-08-19Inter Real Madrid€35m

Reported moves, dated and attributed (api-football.com), news facts, not a valuation site’s estimates. It never touches a call.

In our coverage · Croatia’s record

  • v Ghana2–1Called it
  • at Panama0–1Called it
  • at England4–2Called it

The newsroom’s calls on Croatia. Team-level, never dressed up as a player stat.

Squad · sourced