Is there a soccer equivalent of the Luka Doncic-Anthony Davis trade?

Before we begin, I would appreciate your blanket sympathy.

It is difficult enough to be a football journalist during the final days of a transfer window, covering a club with a large, passionate and demanding global fanbase and a recent track record of being extremely active in the market (even if they don’t end up doing much business) without your mind being inexorably drawn elsewhere.

If it emerges soon that Chelsea struck a deal to sign a 17-year-old wonderkid from Peru on transfer deadline day I can only apologise for not finding out about it sooner, because as an avid NBA fan I have been relentlessly and hopelessly distracted by the Luka Doncic-Anthony Davis trade.

To recap for those who know and to recount for those who don’t: on Saturday night in the US and in the early hours of Sunday morning in the UK, two of the world’s best basketball players were traded for each other (along with several other players and a draft pick) in what has been widely described as the most shocking transaction in the history of the NBA. Doncic is now a Los Angeles Laker, Davis is a Dallas Maverick, and it happened without either man having the faintest idea that it was even being discussed.

In the 12 years I have been paying close attention, trades have served as the punctuation marks in the NBA calendar. The bigger ones are headline-grabbing and occasionally even league-altering, but there has been nothing remotely like this. Stars of the calibre of Davis, a 31-year-old champion and generational defensive talent, almost never get traded without their input. Superstars like Doncic, a 25-year-old playmaking phenomenon who led the Mavericks to the NBA Finals last June, almost never get traded at all.

The quest to put this singular mega-event into some kind of broader context has sent many far more knowledgeable basketball observers than me scrambling. Perhaps because of my professional background, one of my first instincts is best summed up by the meme reply you often see on X, formerly Twitter: “Explain in football terms.”

Comparisons between the NBA and European football are perilous for all sorts of reasons, not least the radically different ways that each functions on a sporting and business level. Quantifying the value of individual star talent is one thing in an 11-versus-11 game and quite another in teams of five. Football’s top players and their agents have only relatively recently begun to exercise the kind of leverage over clubs that the biggest names in the NBA have regularly flexed on franchises for the past 15 years, yet footballers in general have a level of control over their career movement that their peers in basketball’s top league could only dream of enjoying.

All the above is worth bearing in mind, but none of it prevents a fun attempt to understand the Doncic-Davis earthquake through the prism of football, and perhaps it will even be illuminating (you can be the judge of that).

OK, so here goes…

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For shock factor, it’s like Luis Figo to Real Madrid

In 20 years there will be a documentary made about the Doncic-Davis trade, and we can only hope it will be as good as Netflix’s The Figo Affair: The Transfer that Changed Football.

The Machiavellian machinations deployed by Florentino Perez in 2000 — using the promise of signing Luis Figo (pictured top) away from arch-rivals Barcelona to win the Real Madrid presidential election while simultaneously ensnaring the Portugal international and his representatives in a contractual agreement they could not escape — are on par with Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka deftly complying with his Mavericks counterpart Nico Harrison’s desire to keep Doncic’s trade availability a secret from potential rival bidders.

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There was even something in the first post-trade picture of Doncic, wearing a thin smile beneath exhausted eyes sitting next to a triumphant Pelinka, that evoked memories of the faintly haunted look Figo wore while holding up a Madrid shirt alongside Perez. Madrid are also by far the closest thing in football to the Lakers in terms of glamour, stature and self-regard, but this is where the similarities end.

Figo was already at the peak of his powers in 2000, two years older than Doncic and a few months shy of winning the Ballon d’Or. It was also ultimately a transfer rather than a trade; despite being backed into a corner by Perez and his representatives, Figo publicly owned the decision to join Madrid and leave Barcelona, who had to console themselves with a world-record transfer fee and a burning sense of fury.

That decision made Figo an eternal hate figure at Camp Nou, a place where he was once every bit as revered as Doncic was in Dallas. Being traded away gives Doncic plausible deniability that he would ever have considered leaving of his own volition, sparing him the acrimony that typically follows such painful sporting divorces. He is free to embrace life as a Laker.

Put it this way: no Mavericks fan is going to throw a pig’s head at Doncic when he returns to American Airlines Center with the Lakers in April. Harrison, on the other hand…

For lopsided value, it’s like William Gallas (plus £5m) for Ashley Cole

Harrison is being roundly panned in the basketball world not just for being willing to trade Doncic, but for how little he got beyond Davis from the Lakers in return. The modern NBA trend is for the team acquiring the transcendent superstar to trade their future for the present, giving up all the draft picks and bright young players they have in return for a meaningful shot at winning a title in the short term.

The trade-offs in conventional football transfers are rarely so stark, and the relatively short list of high-profile player swap deals in football this century yields potential comparisons of wildly varying quality. Arsenal and Manchester United’s ill-fated cashless trade of Alexis Sanchez and Henrikh Mkhitaryan in 2018, for example, offers no lesson beyond the fact that the Lakers missed a trick by not unveiling Doncic playing the piano.

Barcelona’s stunning acquisition of Deco from Porto for just €15million (then £34.1m, $18.75m) and Ricardo Quaresma in the summer of 2004 is closer to the ballpark, but the value imbalance is too extreme: Deco, a year on from winning the Champions League, was arguably the best No 10 in Europe at the time while Quaresma had already disappointed at Barcelona in a fitting prelude to a disappointing career for a tantalising talent. Davis, a 10-time NBA All-Star, deserves better.

The modern football swap deal with the most parallels is the acrimonious agreement that took Ashley Cole from Arsenal to rivals Chelsea on summer transfer deadline day in 2006, in return for William Gallas and £5m in cash.

Gallas was an excellent, highly versatile defender at Chelsea who distinguished himself under Jose Mourinho at left-back, while publicly pining to play centre-back (something that will resonate with anyone familiar with Davis, who has established himself as a brilliant center while repeatedly insisting he is actually a power forward). He was also more than three years older than Cole who, like Doncic, was regarded as a generational talent at his position.

Chelsea gave up a very good player to get a better, younger one for a relatively small additional cost, though £5m was a bigger number in the mid-2000s transfer market than it is in 2025. Cole, an eager participant in the protracted, messy process, was immediately cast as the kind of villain Doncic will never be in Dallas.

For pure talent trade, it’s like Samuel Eto’o for Zlatan Ibrahimovic

Leaving the value dynamics aside, neither Cole nor Gallas ever enjoyed the relative status within European football that Doncic and Davis command in the NBA. It would be a struggle to find any reasonable basketball fan who would rank either outside their top 10 to 15 players in the sport, across all positions (and Doncic would likely be a unanimous top-five pick).

For real-world football examples, then, we must look higher. No player swap deal has ever been more star-studded than the trade which took Zlatan Ibrahimovic from Inter Milan to Champions League winners Barcelona in the summer of 2009 in exchange for Samuel Eto’o, and around £40m.

In terms of value it’s a contrasting case of giving up too much, rather than too little, for a superstar. Eto’o and Ibrahimovic were pretty much equals: two of the greatest No 9s of their generation who went on to finish fifth and seventh respectively in the 2009 Ballon d’Or voting. There was no reasonable cause for Barcelona to throw in such a large fee on top.

But just as Doncic, by all accounts, was deemed to have become a bad cultural fit with the Harrison-led Mavericks, the strong-willed Eto’o made himself expendable at Barcelona by butting heads with coach Pep Guardiola. The folly of swapping him out for Ibrahimovic, football’s most brash individualist outside of Cristiano Ronaldo, was exposed in less than a year. Davis, a much more laid-back character, should have a longer shelf life in Dallas.

But in reality, it’s more like nothing football has ever seen

All of the above comparisons capture elements of the Doncic-Davis megatrade, but none quite do justice to it in totality. It is the confluence of factors that makes this particular story so compelling: the lack of warning, the stature of the headline names involved, the perceived imbalance of the trade terms, the emotional scale of what Doncic meant to the Mavericks and the seismic importance of the Lakers managing to land their successor to LeBron James.

A truly fitting football equivalent can only be found in the realm of the hypothetical. It might be Barcelona shipping out a 20-year-old Lionel Messi in the summer of 2008 — when he was on the cusp of first scaling Ballon d’Or-winning heights under Guardiola — for, let’s say Sergio Ramos. Doncic is by no means destined to be basketball’s GOAT, but he is already well on the way to compiling the individual resume of an all-time great.

Or it might be Manchester United selling Cristiano Ronaldo to Madrid in 2007 rather than 2009, just before his supreme individual talent began to drive Champions League-winning team success, and getting back Fabio Cannavaro. Not insignificant compensation, but no meaningful consolation for a historic mistake.

By all means, make your own attempts to explain what happened in the NBA last weekend in football terms in the comments. I’m going to ask around about that Peruvian teenager.

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(Top photo: Luis Figo by Mike Egerton/EMPICS; Luka Doncic by Harry How; both via Getty Images)

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6115963/2025/02/06/is-there-a-footballing-equivalent-of-the-luka-doncic-anthony-davis-trade/

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