With just a few days remaining of this summer’s transfer window, all 20 Premier League clubs will be looking to complete their final pieces of business and put themselves in the best possible position for the season ahead.
Each of those teams will have identified areas of their squad that they believe still need strengthening, with the final opportunity to address those weaknesses rapidly approaching. But as we reach the end of this year’s window, business late in the market usually comes at a cost.
The question is whether the potential benefit of adding that final piece outweighs the premium required to get the deal over the line. With the window closing, which clubs still have the most to gain from making one last move?
One of those clubs could be Manchester City, and with there being persistent links surrounding the capture of Enzo Fernandez from fellow Premier League outfit Chelsea, the Etihad outfit will have to pay in excess of £100m to acquire the Argentine’s services.
A feat that they have already achieved this summer with the arrival of Eliott Anderson from Nottingham Forest, and although his £116m fee was not worthy of the British transfer record, it was only £9m short of the £125m that Liverpool paid to land Alexander Isak 12 months ago.
While the sums involved in these late-window deals may appear eye-watering, they are not without precedent. The history of the transfer market is littered with clubs willing to pay a premium to secure the player they believe can complete their squad.
Looking at the last ten occasions on which the British transfer record was broken provides some context. From Juan Sebastián Verón’s £28.1m move to Manchester United in 2001 to Alexander Isak’s £125m transfer to Liverpool in 2025, the numbers tell their own story.
Date | Player | From | To | Fee | % Difference |
July 2001 | Juan Sebastián Verón | Lazio | Manchester United | £28,100,000 | 24.89% |
July 2002 | Rio Ferdinand | Leeds United | Manchester United | £29,100,000 | 3.56% |
July 2006 | Andriy Shevchenko | Milan | Chelsea | £30,800,000 | 5.84% |
September 2008 | Robinho | Real Madrid | Manchester City | £32,500,000 | 5.52% |
July 2009 | Cristiano Ronaldo | Manchester United | Real Madrid | £80,000,000 | 146.15% |
September 2013 | Gareth Bale | Tottenham Hotspur | Real Madrid | £85,300,000 | 6.63% |
July 2016 | Paul Pogba | Juventus | Manchester United | £89,000,000 | 4.34% |
January 2018 | Philippe Coutinho | Liverpool | Barcelona | £105,000,000 | 17.98% |
January 2023 | Enzo Fernández | Benfica | Chelsea | £106,800,000 | 1.71% |
September 2025 | Alexander Isak | Newcastle United | Liverpool | £125,000,000 | 17.04% |
Although transfers in Britain have been made since 1983 – with Willie Groves’ switch from West Brom to Aston Villa starting the revolution at £100, it is the turn of the millennium onwards that really highlights a step change in the cost of player recruitment.
When Juan Sebastian Veron’s move from Lazio to Manchester United was completed in July 2001, the £28.1m fee was 24.89% greater than the previous record set by Real Madrid’s purchase of Nicolas Anelka from Arsenal two years prior.
In the time between Veron’s move to Old Trafford and Isak’s switch from St James’ Park to Anfield 24 years later, the record has increased by £96.9m or, if you want to measure it in percentage terms, a leap of 340%.
Some of that leap will have been driven by inflation, and if you took Veron’s £28.1m fee and converted it today, that same move would have been worth £68.5m. Even with that conversion, it is still £56.5m less than the existing British transfer record.
The seismic leap from Veron to Isak is no real surprise as the millions that circled round the Premier League’s coffers have now been upgraded to billions, and although a gap in values across the space of 24 years may be the headline, when you dig a little deeper into the numbers there is another story.
Because the further the record has climbed, the more difficult it has been to then make a meaningful jump beyond it. If you take the period from Veron’s record-breaking deal in 2001 to Robinho’s move to Manchester City seven years later, the record only moved up by £4.4m.
Not only that, but it was also broken by the deals involving Rio Ferdinand and Andriy Shevchenko within that same seven-year stretch. Three further records post-Veron, £32.5m setting the gold standard in terms of transfer business.
ALONG COMES RONALDO
What happens when the British transfer record gets blown out of the water? Cristiano Ronaldo leaves Manchester United, and although his switch was only 10 months after Robinho arrived at the Etihad, the size of the deal was nearly two and a half times greater.
£32.5m becomes £80m, and the transfer game has arguably been changed forever at this point, but due to such a huge leap, the pace of increase could never be sustained. Yes, there were always going to be increases, but never at this same scale.
Which means in the 16 years since the Portuguese icon swapped Manchester for Madrid, the pattern has been rather different, and when Gareth Bale joined him at the Santiago Bernabeu, the fee of £85.3m was only 6.63% higher.
Three years later, Paul Pogba raised it by 4.34% after joining Manchester United from Juventus for £89m. By 2018, Philippe Coutinho’s £105m move from Liverpool to Barcelona placed another 17.98% on top.
Coutinho swapping employers in 2018, Enzo Fernandez did the same five years later and edged the British transfer record up a further 1.71% when switching Benfica to Chelsea for £106.8m – a figure that held the record until September 2025.
Alexander Isak serving as the current high watermark in British transfer business, his £125m move to Liverpool thrusting the record up another 17.04% to where it stands now, but the big question is where does it go next?
A LOOK TO THE FUTURE
If we look at the percentage increase of every British transfer record in history, the average rise is 27.18%, but with Jimmy Settle’s 300% increase in 1899 when he moved from Bury to Everton having the ability to muddy the waters, we can look at the increase of the last 10 transfers above.
If we use that range, the average switch is 23.37%, but by the same token, the Cristiano Ronaldo deal in 2009 also serves as something of an outlier. Therefore, if we look at the deals that have taken place post-2009, the increase on average is 9.54%.
If the British transfer record were to increase by 9.54%, the current £125m benchmark would rise to approximately £136.9m and this would make Manchester City's pursuit of Enzo Fernández particularly interesting.
A fee of £126m would technically create a new British transfer record, but a deal worth around £136.9m would represent an increase much closer to the modern pattern of record-breaking transfers.
With the clock ticking on the transfer window, perhaps the question isn't whether the British transfer record can be broken. It is whether Manchester City are prepared to pay the £136.9m needed to break it in line with the modern trend.
