Raphinha's value revealed by new scouting platform FIVEYARDS as Leeds United fans invest in Brazilian winger

New football platform FIVEYARDS allows supporters to play scout and director of football at the same time, by spotting players who will go on to bigger things and putting their money where their mouth is.

And Leeds fans, unsurprisingly, are putting their money on Raphinha, making the Whites’ Brazilian winger the 37th most bought of the platform’s 700 available players.

Co-founder Guy Rogers has a background in bookmaking and football through Squawka and 21st Club, who advise football clubs.

He describes FIVEYARDS as a transfer market for fans, rather than a football stock market for traders, in which the players they buy earn money based on the platform’s set ‘performance pay’ – value generated by appearances, goals and assists, based on the level of competition.

“You buy and sell players and each player has a price,” he told the YEP. “Patrick Bamford, for example, is £19m, which is his price based on the performance pay he’s expected to make over the rest of his career.

“The pay is set per competition and goes up for the Champions League or down for the Championship. It has been set so player values seem similar to the transfer market.

“If you had bought Lionel Messi aged 15, he would have earned you about £360m in performance pay.”

FIVEYARDS is a regulated gambling product, which Rogers admits it’s the ‘elephant in the room’ but insists they are at the softer end of the industry’s scale because users cannot chase their money and there are only two occasions per week, called transfer windows, when players can be bought or sold.

Every million of a player’s value costs £10 in real cash and users can buy anywhere from one per cent to 100 per cent of a player.

Kylian Mbappé is the most expensive player at £200m, so one percent ownership of the PSG star would cost £20, but any player can be requested.

The current most-bought player on FIVEYARDS is Ipswich 16-year-old Finlay Corrigan, just signed by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation agency, with Brentford striker Ivan Toney second and the man constantly linked with Leeds, Rodrigo de Paul, third.

There is a free version, which allows users to simply scout players and compete in leaderboards based on their success.

Around half of FIVEYARDS’ users are opting to play for money, however, with the chance to win on two fronts.

“We have two transfer windows per week and in those you can sell the player back to us and we take a five per cent fee,” said Rogers.

“If you bought Bamford today at £19m and at the weekend he scored two and Leeds won, you’d earn £390,000. If you sold him the next week and his price stayed the same you’d have netted £390,000. That’s on a very short time frame but for most it’s a much longer time frame.

“He was £14m at the start of the season and he’s made £3.5m in performance pay, so if you had him at the start you’d actually have made £8.5m. No-one knew quite how well Bamford would do or if he would still necessarily be starting. So even though we might have rated him fairly highly, it wouldn’t have been as high as he’s performing.”

Other than Bamford, a raft of Leeds youngsters have been bought by users, including Sam Greenwood, Cody Drameh, Pascal Struijk and Joe Gelhardt, whose price went up after his inclusion on Marcelo Bielsa’s bench against Crystal Palace.

But Raphinha, a player even Bamford is surprised to have in the Leeds changing room, is the one getting people most excited. “He has been a steal for Leeds,” said the goalscorer this week. “I am surprised that more established Premier League teams haven’t taken a punt on him because he really is someone special, and he is young.”

Josh Hobbs, a Whites supporter, works for FIVEYARDS as a scout and assigns player ratings based on his predictions of how their current season and the following two will go, and their chances of a big move.

“We’ve had a lot of interest in Raphinha,” he said.

“It helped that Leeds played on Monday, so his ridiculously good performance was fresh in everyone’s minds. We’ve got him at £34m and I think Leeds would want a fair bit more than that if they were selling right now, but it’s expecting him to go onto Champions League performance pay in the future.

“With Raphinha, at a very early stage, I’m thinking he’s got a move in his future.

“There are people across the users on the platform buying him, not just Leeds fans. He’s in a team outside European competition right now, but has potential to play higher, as much as Leeds fans hate the idea of that, apart from if he’s playing for us.”