When you begin playing Top Eleven, you begin with a 3*-4* team, which means ranging between level 10 and 19 players. As you progress through the game and are promoted to the next level, your players are docked a star, to improve competition and to promote your team's skill, as well as your league.
Obviously your very first team from season 1 isn't F.C. Barcelona yet, but how far are you from being the equivalent of today's Barcelona in Top Eleven? This thread isn't about Barcelona the team itself, but its players, and calculating the average quality of Barcelona's players as whole would take too much time, so I would prefer to compare our season 1 newcomers to F.C. Barcelona's most famous player: Lionel Messi.
From numerous sources around the Internet, although they might be completely false, (in which case just go along with me) Messi's value (or "worth", as we see it in the Top Eleven Transfer Market) is approximately $50,000,000 ($50M). I don't quite remember how much you and your team are granted to begin your T11 career, but it's definitely a minute digit compared to $50M.
Your 4* players from your season 1 team were valued at approximately 100K-200K ($0.1M-$0.2M) each. That's just giving you a very quick glimpse of how far you are away from having a player equivalent to Messi in your team. You'd have to multiply your 4* player's worth by 500 to achieve Messi's IRL value. That's a lot.
Going into more detail, the approximate value of an 18-year-old 4* (Q15-Q19) player when you're in the first season is $1M. That's including all the qualifying players that are worth over and under $1M, of course. Now, I am not entirely sure about the next bit, as I'm not at this level currently, but I can give an estimation that an 18-year-old 4* (Q35-Q39) in the 5th season is worth approximately $5M.
Although the value isn't everything, as we can notice from the terrible, young players valuing more than the better, older players. Lionel Messi, who doesn't exist in the game unless you've coughcoughwastedcough 1T on player information changing, doesn't have skill that can be measured in any possible way, aside from lucky guesses, in the real world. Let's, together, make Lionel Messi a scout player, as he does stand out from Barcelona, and has received many prizes, medals and trophies himself and for his team, thanks to him.
So, a 6* player, called Lionel Messi, in this example, worth ~$50,000,000. What level in the game would you need to be to have a player like this?
Seeing as, in my last few estimations, we said that an 18-year-old 4* player for a level 5 manager is worth approximately $5M, and through some calculations and careful checking, the value of a player increases by about $0.3333...M every star gained, and depreciates by $50,000 ($50K) every year he gets older. Keeping in mind Messi's real age (25), a 25yo 6* player for someone in the 5th level would be worth $5.25M. I chose this as it represented as closely as possible Messi's worth, divided by 10.
That being said, all we need to do is to multiply everything we have said about this 6* player for a Level 5 manager, here by 10, in order to have a player worth $50M (or $52.5M, to be precise). So you would have to be, in theory, level 50 to have a player like this. What skill level would Messi be? Considering that a 6* player at level 5 has an average skill level of at least 45, meaning that Messi's would be 450.
Level 450: what is that? Aside from being Messi's would-be T11 skill level, it can be translated, for newbies who joined us this season, a player with 100 stars, or a scout with 94 red stars.
Unfortunately, it would be impossible to have a player as good as Lionel Messi in this game right now, seeing as we are right in the middle of the 37th season, so for someone who began playing this game on Day 1 (aside from the Admins, I don't really know any one who did...) and who was promoted every single season (not a very big chance of this having happened), he is still quite far off from having a Messi-equivalent of his team. 14 seasons, actually. And by then, in the 41st season (Saturday, 5th of April 2014 - Saturday, 3rd of May 2014), someone will have a 5* player, who is as good as today's Messi.
That's in quite a long time, and he's going to be pretty expensive.
