After his electrifying goal for Mexico against Saudi Arabia Pachuca’s Luis Chavez caught the attention of many teams across the world. Bayern Leverkusen were not shy about showing their interest for the Mexican midfielder on social media. In spite of all this, and the fact that there were already rumors linking Chavez to Porto even before the tournament the president of Pachuca Armando Martinez recently mentioned that no serious offers have arrived on his desk for the player. Even though there has been no formal request from European clubs to buy Chavez, Martinez still believes that his home grown player will be playing in Europe pretty soon. He does however regret the fact that European clubs don’t value Mexican players. He recently mentioned,
“We believe that Luis has the capacity to play any football in the world, he has an impressive capacity, when he is at his best. We have to give our players the right value, because it’s not fair that if Luis were Portuguese, Brazilian, Uruguayan or Argentine he could be worth X and for being Mexican he’s worth 20 percent of what he could be worth”
Martinez Is Likely Just Playing His Cards To Drive Up Chavez’s Value
The younger Martinez brother who now presides over Pachuca is potentially making these claims to drive up the value that Chavez could command on the open market. Still, his comments about Mexican players being undervalued in the global market are quite accurate. It’s perhaps one of the biggest reasons why we don’t see more Liga MX players transferred to European clubs. The general issue is that Mexican players make a lot of money playing in Liga MX, and European clubs want to come in and offer 2 million dollars for them. When that same player could be sold within Liga MX for 8 or 10 million.
From what Martinez is saying the team is looking to do right by Chavez and find him a suitable team in Europe. We talked about Pachuca’s finances in a recent article. Simply put Pachuca needs to sell Chavez because the team largely relies on the sale of players to continue to exist. Also, they need to sell him fast because he’ll be 27 in January. His value will potentially never be as high as it is right now. Expect a sale to either a Liga MX club or Europe, but it would be odd to see Pachuca hang on to him as well as many of the players from their young core.
No Formal Offers For Any Mexican Players So Far
Cesar Montes of Monterrey, and even Alexis Vega of Chivas were two other players from the Mexican national team that were linked to European clubs. There was even a rumor that linked Alexis Vega to Chelsea. Kind of as a rule of thumb, 99.9% of the rumors that put Mexican players in the orbit of large European clubs are fake. Chicharito is the only outlier where he as a player with a real Liga MX career who was able to make the jump to Manchester United. Yes, there are cases like Uriel Antuna, and Edson Rivera with Chelsea as well. These guys were essentially academy players though when they were scooped up by the English club. We mentioned that one of the biggest problems for Vega was his 2.5 million dollar salary at Chivas. There’s no European side that would offer him that much money at this point.
So far neither Montes nor Vega or Kevin Alvarez have received formal offers from European clubs. That shouldn’t be too alarming just yet. Since this is a winter World Cup we don’t really know how teams are going to react. So far there have been no major signings of any World Cup standouts at this point in the tournament. There’s still hope for the Mexican youngsters.
